OPINION:Barack Obama's election would restore confidence in American leadership worldwide, writes Niall O'Dowd
TWO WEEKS ago in a conversation with Denis McDonough, Barack Obama's foreign policy adviser, I told him my New York-based newspaper, Irish Voice, was endorsing his candidate.
He was pleased to say the least. Anything that helps with the white ethnic vote in key battleground states such as Pennsylvania, where Irish Americans make up 20 per cent of the population, is helpful for his candidate. At the time the race was neck and neck. But he was also surprised I think.
My newspaper had been quite critical of Obama for not showing up at the Irish presidential forum that McCain had attended, and also for his stumble on whether he would renew the position of US Special Envoy to Ireland.
But we were never going to judge this election on perceived ethnic slights alone. These are the worst of times in America. A recession verging on depression, an unpopular war, and a deeply disliked president have all combined to make Americans more restless for dramatic change than at any time in my almost 30 years here.
At such a time I felt my newspaper needed to put aside many of the issues that we as a community believe dearly in when it comes to choosing a president. I think it is simply too fraught a time to play the ethnic see-saw game between the two candidates.
It mattered a lot more just a few elections ago in 1992 when our community and Irish Voicetook the lead in backing the then untried Bill Clinton as our candidate in the November election because he had given us undertakings that he would become involved in Northern Ireland - an unheard of position for an American president to take at the time.
George Bush snr had given no such assurances and, indeed, exhibited utter disinterest in the issue during his four years in office.
Painful as it was for both Britain and the unionists, at least at the beginning, it was soon clear that American intervention was an underpinning of the entire success of the process. There is no such qualitative difference between the presidential candidates on Irish issues this election.
John McCain has been eloquent and supportive on immigration and helpful on Northern Ireland.
After a brief stumble on the issue of the special envoy, Obama's campaign has clearly become far more responsive to the Irish American community, as last week's detailed answers to the Ancient Order of Hibernians questionnaire on issues such as immigration and Northern Ireland proved. Both men, it must be said, would be friends of Irish America and Ireland if elected. Both, too, seem proud of their shared Irish heritage.
But on the much broader issue of who can take this country out of the slough of despondency it has sunk into and create new leadership that the world is desperately seeking, there is no doubt that there is a crystal clear choice.
Indeed it is abundantly clear that one candidate far outstrips the other when it comes to the need to effect the change Americans desperately seek.
Barack Obama is that man. He would send an extraordinary message to the world, if he is elected, that America is prepared to turn a new chapter, first of all by electing an African American to the highest position in the land. He is no ordinary African American either, the grandson of a Kenyan goat herder, born to a single mother, a man who hardly knew his father.
Now in a retelling of the classic immigrant family success story, unique to America, he stands on the threshold of the White House.
We Irish can relate to that extraordinary moment in time, that "up from the bootstraps" moment where nothing is ever the same again for our community or the world. Whether it was John F Kennedy smashing the anti-Catholic bigotry in 1960 or Ronald Reagan overcoming his own desperately humble beginnings as the son of an alcoholic salesman to win the presidency in 1980, the die was cast and a new direction pointed for ever more.
It is perhaps no coincidence that both men are the lodestars of their respective parties today.
Barack Obama's election would also immediately restore confidence in American leadership worldwide, that has sadly been badly lacking in the Bush years.
Unilateralism as a system of governance has clearly not worked.
In the aftermath of 9/11 we were the most admired and respected country on earth. "We are all Americans now," Le Mondeeditorialised on September 12th, 2001. Ireland declared a day of national mourning in solidarity with America.
A new era beckoned in international co-operation - and yet Bush frittered all that away by rushing to war in Iraq and insisting that whatever the crisis, wherever in the world, he had the only legitimate world view on how to solve it.
It is painful to travel overseas and see how far our star has sunk. The US cannot separate itself from the western and indeed eastern world as isolationists here would wish us to.
The latest financial crisis definitively proves that. We are all connected and just one e-mail away.
Barack Obama has the ability to transform the current view of America with his election. He would send an eloquent signal to the world that America has made a fresh start, that the tired and stale policies of the recent past have been banished for good and that a vibrant new era has arrived. He will also prove once again America's extraordinary and unique ability to reinvent itself.
He should be our next president.
Niall O'Dowd is the founder and publisher of Irish Voicenewspaper