The Most Important Election in the World

There can be no doubt that today’s American presidential election is historic.

We could see that the outcome gives the superpower its first female vice-president. Or the majority of American voters could send its first African-American to the White House.

The campaign has been intense and clarifying. It has been conducted in the shadow of a deep and serious financial crisis, and has left no doubt that the coming president will face challenges we have never seen before in modern times.

Barack Obama and John McCain are both well-qualified for the job. George W. Bush represented a political direction we were warned about in our part of the world. It has proven to be a timely warning.

It is no coincidence that the sitting president chose to take the weekend off in the last days leading up to the election. No one in the Republican Party wanted Bush to remind the voters of his existence. The Bush policies have been a domestic and international failure.

In two months the Bush era will be history. It is time to look forward. Also, when it comes to Norway’s relationship to the United States, we have to redefine our mental USA-map, regardless of who wins. We must greet America’s new leader with openness.

Both candidates are safe bets in terms of foreign policy. Neither of them belongs to the one-dimensional ideological direction Bush represented. We can expect more dialogue and more rationality than we have seen in his period. From a European perspective, there can be little doubt that Obama is closest to our political soul. It has been almost absurd to see how he has been labeled a “socialist” during the campaign because he suggested a redistribution policy which is political common ground in our part of the world.

We have also seen that Obama wants to revitalize political alliances to a stronger degree than McCain, safely knowing that the common problems in the world must be solved in cooperation with others – and not through insisting on a unilateralism that creates more problem than it solves.

Obviously, we have no illusions that the next president of the United States will live up to our Norwegian expectations. He has to serve his own country’s power and interests first. But we do believe that the world is better off with a presidency consisting of Barack Obama and Joe Biden. Because there is too much uncertainty associated with John McCain and Sarah Palin – especially the latter.

The last thing we need is another eight years of George W. Bush and Dick Cheney in the White House.