Overseas Media React to Super Tuesday, McCain
While it's an American election, the foreign media have been keeping a careful watch on the comings and goings of our presidential race. And the events of the past week - the Super Tuesday results and John McCain's emergence as the Republican frontrunner and probable nominee - have generated some interesting comments.
The BBC reports on the mood of conservatives attending the McCain speech at CPAC Thursday, summing it up as as not happy with McCain as their presidential nominee but "a lack of realistic alternatives gave them little choice."
Julian Sanchez, blogging for the Guardian, picked up on this sentiment as well, finding clues to this feeling of "McCain or the Democrats" in the introduction he received from conservative Senator Tom Coburn.
"As he prepared to hand over the podium to his colleague ... Coburn announced that he would be 'happy to debate anyone who thinks staying home or supporting Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama is a better option' than backing McCain. What's telling is that here, at the Woodstock of the American right, he might find quite a few takers."
Larry Derfner, writing in the Jerusalem Post, writes that the best way for McCain to defeat either Obama or Clinton in the fall is to ask Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice to be his running mate.
"Rice is attractive and extremely telegenic. She's also a woman and an African-American, which by now aren't fatal flaws in a candidate for president or vice-president, but probably net advantages. This year, for the Republicans, I'd say Rice's gender and race would be nothing less than the gift of life."
But it's Ed O'Loughlin, reporting for the Sydney Morning Herald from Jerusalem, who suggests that it isn't John McCain that the Israeli political establishment is quietly rooting for.
"That unofficial honour goes to Senator Clinton, who Palestinians accuse of taking an increasingly one-sided approach to the Middle East conflict. Visiting the region in 2005 as senator for New York, Senator Clinton shunned the Palestinians completely, meeting only Israeli leaders and hearing and expressing only Israeli positions. She particularly galled Palestinians by enthusiastically backing the 700-kilometre complex of walls and fences that Israel is building inside the West Bank."
Finally, Siri Agrell writes in Canada's Globe and Mail that while every possible demographic has been offered up as the key to winning the election - women, African-Americans, Latinos, for instance the group that might really might hold the key to the White House is "the dude vote."
"If you look at the demographics state by state, you can see that, right now, Obama's being kept alive by white guys," said Richard Parker, a Harvard lecturer and co-founder of Mother Jones magazine. "It's the one group which is not voting identity politics because they don't have a candidate."
11:56 AM ET | 02- 8-2008 | permalink
