Barack Obama's candidacy

I'm a keen observer of US Presidential Elections and the '08 battle is shaping up as a beauty. Given I will need to work closely with the next American President, I'm fascinated by the positioning for the Democratic nomination.

Barack Obama has effectively joined the fray and I must say I've been impressed with his approach so far. He comes across as a "real-person" politician who is strong on social justice and has been a vocal dissident against the US's involvement in Iraq.

One of Australia's brightest Economics stars, Dr Andrew Leigh, has recently published a review of Obama's latest book "The Audacity of Hope". As Dr Leigh points out, there are a number of difficulties Obama will face:

"If Obama hopes to be a serious contender for the Presidency, he will face a few challenges. One is his name. If it wasn’t enough that his surname is only a consonant away from the mastermind of the September 11 attacks, there is the fact that Obama’s middle name is Hussein. Will middle-America really vote for a man called Barack Hussein Obama to be the commander-in-chief of their armed forces?

Another challenge will be Obama’s candour about his past life. In Dreams from My Father, he wrote that in his youth, “Pot had helped, and booze; maybe a little blow when you could afford it” (“blow” is street slang for cocaine). How will US voters react to a man whose father was a Kenyan big man, and whose step-father is an Indonesian Muslim? What will they make of the suggestion that his grandparents left Texas in part because of their discomfort with small-town racism?

The rational part of me thinks that these kinks will probably derail the Obama train. When the barrage of attack ads begins (as it surely will), Obama is going to need more than appeals to decency and unity. But after you turn the last page of his book, it’s hard not to hope that Obama’s audacity will somehow inspire the best of America. "

I don't necessarily agree with all of Obama's positions on pro-choice, but he will make the primaries fascinating when up against the JFK-smile of John Edwards and the power and money of Hilary Clinton's campaign.

Whether any of them can overcome a John McCain Republican nomination is yet to be seen, although for the sake of progressive politics I hope so.

Finally, the eerie similarities between this election and The West Wing continue with Obama as Matt Santos and McCain as the moderate Republican Arnold Vinick.