David Gildeh

You know you’re back in the US when people don’t understand you saying “tomato” anymore…

I got back yesterday to Baltimore after my week home in the UK and will be here for another 3 weeks. However I have noticed some disturbing developments in the US Democratic Primaries since I’ve been away. Its getting nasty! Its really an all out fight between Obama and Clinton, and to be honest any outsider looking on from the side probably wouldn’t want to vote for either of them after all the cat fighting going on – especially around the race issue!

Whats particularly disturbing is that everyone else (the rest of the world) does not want to see another republican President, they want a democrat with more open minded views about the rest of the world who doesn’t intend to fight a 100 year war in the middle east and perpetuate Bush’s dismal policies! However, while the democrats look “certain” to win, how can they effectively lead a country if both of the main candidates reputations and abilities have been tarnished – by their own party! This type of in-fighting led to the conservatives in the UK losing the elections a few years back and potentially split parties and the people making it impossible for any progress to be made on key issues.

While having “primaries” to decide which candidate will run for president is democratic, allowing the people to vote instead of party members, maybe the public shouldn’t see all this in-fighting? It damages the reputations of the candidates and the party itself. In the UK the parties themselves choose who will lead – long before the general elections, so while we do get to hear about the in-fighting in the news, a lot is kept out of view and it is long decided and forgotten by the time the general elections come up (if they time it properly) when the people then vote for who to lead the country. No systems perfect, but surely that’s a better system than putting all the potential candidates on stage for everyone to see them fight neck and teeth to run for president for that party? There’s enough fighting against the other parties let alone between themselves. What’s particularly nasty about this in-fighting is because there is no obvious difference in policies between Obama and Clinton, the fighting is taking the low ground on character, ability and race, all things that will potentially harm both candidates, even the one that wins will look bad for stooping to such low levels, not really the quality of a world leader…

Anyway, I would still like to see Obama as president (as mentioned in previous blogs) but I’m worried that he won’t be as effective after all this in-fighting, and the people who need to follow his visions for the country will be disillusioned by the whole process.