Comments on: Obama and Africa

By: Dave Justus

Dave Justus — Wed, 18 Jun 2008 22:51:55 +0000

Probligo, apparently you can’t read the thing you post. The only African country in the survey, Nigeria, has a positive impression of Bush, supporting what Gib and I are saying.

Certainly Bush isn’t popular in the middle east, which is very heavily represented in that survey. No eastern European countries are included, unless you count Russia and Ukraine which are a bit out of the area I was thinking of. I wasn’t aware though that he was so popular in the worlds largest democracy.

By: probligo

probligo — Wed, 18 Jun 2008 19:26:40 +0000

Sorry about the messy tags…

By: Dave Justus

Dave Justus — Mon, 16 Jun 2008 15:00:09 +0000

By the economic argument, I meant that a redistributionist and protectionist economic policy, which would be bad for us, is really bad for a developing country. Rich countries can afford, for a time at least, a highly socialist economy, like that embraced by most of Europe. Poor counties can’t do that, and a democractic developing country that embraces those policies will probably fail to deliver meaningful improvement in the quality of life of its people. That has the danger of souring people on democracy overall.

And of course U.S. protectionism will hurt us, but it will hurt developing countries even more.

That said, I certainly see your point about Obama’s potential in this area, and it is something to seriously think about. I would like to see him really raise this as a campaign issue.

By: Gib

Gib — Mon, 16 Jun 2008 14:45:20 +0000

The downside in all of this is that I am not sure Obama’s economic vision for the U.S., and by extension his vision for the developing world, is even close to the right way to go.

I’m actually pretty sure it’s not the right way to go. America will be stronger economically with McCain in charge - of this I have little doubt. That being said, should he win, Obama will take office with greater power to affect global change just by giving the right speech in the right place - to get rid of a dictator, McCain will probably have to bomb or invade someone.

And since America can certainly survive anything Obama can do, to me at least, the prospect of freeing Zimbabwe (which almost certainly cannot survive four more years of Mugabe and his goon squad) and maybe others would be enough to make the higher taxes and the idiot left-wing law professors on the courts bearable. In four years, we’ll have the chance to make Bobby Jindal President and let him fix the really stupid stuff.