Don't Matter If You're Black Or White

It's a brand new shiny year, and for the United States and the world, it might be the most important year ever.

This is the year America can choose one of a couple of course-altering firsts - the first woman president or the first black president - or it can fall back on a choice from the usual bevy of Romneys, McCains, or Huckabees. Meanwhile, the world looks on. If the world had hands, it would be wringing them right now.

So much is riding on the 2008 presidential election that the six billion other people in the world wish they had a vote too. Outside of the US, there is universal agreement that George W. Bush has been the worst president since Millard Fillmore or at least Jimmy Carter.

A French journalist said it best: "The 2008 presidential election is really crucial for America and the world," said Philippe Boulet-Gercourt. "They can influence the world in a thousand ways; even if they elect a teddy bear, it is better than those eight years of Bush."

Right now you're thinking, maybe I underestimated Dubya. If he annoys a hyphenated French journalist, he must be doing something right. But even diehard neocons know they are probably engaging in an exercise in futility, trying to find the right neocon lite to match the Democrat Great Black or Female Hope.

Even if, somehow, real peace and democracy break out in Iraq, the American people will have a hard time forgetting the whole weapons of mass deception farce and how, after 9/11, the Bush administration took advantage of their righteous anger and patriotism to squander trillions of dollars on the Saddam Hussein adventure, when it should have been focusing on Al Qaeda, to say the least.

So now, the US is faced with the highest deficit in history; the economy is heading south, and there are a few other challenges on the table that Bush et al have ignored while making Iraq an even greater living hell than it was under the tender ministrations of Saddam Hussein. Health care. The environment. Dependence on foreign oil. The deteriorating situation in Pakistan. I don't know about you, but I won't be surprised if voters go as far from George Bush as they can get. If Hillary was black, she'd win in a landslide.

But even Hillary is tainted by the Bush years. She was a senator; she voted too carefully and strategically, and now she's being called to account by an electorate who don't like the smell of politics that follows her around.

As I write, Barack Obama, the son of a Kenyan goat herder, is riding the momentum from his victory in the Iowa caucuses and has taken the lead on the eve of the New Hampshire primary.

Voters may not be sure what Obama actually stands for, but they can tell, just by looking at him, that he ain't George Bush. And they can't say that about Mike Huckabee, Mitt Romney, Rudy Giuliani, Fred Thompson, or even that old warhorse John McCain, who is Washington's longest-surviving outsider on the inside.

George W. Bush has made it tough for rich white guys everywhere. Even Democrat John Edwards, who is desperately trying to Be Like Obama, will have to stand in line with the other rich white guys and explain why he and the boys have managed to get it so wrong for the last eight years.

Speaking of desperate, voters in Iowa and New Hampshire are demonstrating that they are at least impatient to throw out the old bums and install the new ones. It's as if they have awakened from a trance:

When it was ok to spend money we haven't got on wars in faraway places that haven't got anything to do with us;

When that war was going wrong, the next bright idea was to invade the even bigger nastier country next door - and meanwhile, things aren't going so well in Afghanistan, are they?

When, instead of responding to global warming, the administration responded to the harbingers of global warming by trying to discredit them, and then pushed to drill for oil in Alaska;

When, as the deficit mounted, Washington lowered taxes for people who were already loaded while more than 40 million people go without health care;

When the vice-president of the US shot his hunting partner in the face and the hunting partner just shrugged it off. Boys will be boys.

When the president of the United States thought Nelson Mandela was dead. Yikes.

The more you examine the record of the Bush administration, the better Barack Obama looks. Of course, it's still early in the daunting ordeal that presidential candidates put themselves through to claim the world's toughest job, but if the election were held today, and it didn't come down to a state run by a member of the Bush family, at the end of the day, Barack Obama would be the new president.

What that means is mind-blowing. After eight years of nostalgic reaction against change, Americans are once again prepared to embrace it. I guess 1958 wasn't so great after all. But a final word of caution: it doesn't really come down to a choice of black or white. In fact, as Michael Jackson, (who apparently tried to be both) once wrote: It don't matter if you're black or white. What matters is that you're the right person for the job.