History In The Making
+ Cardinal George Pell, Archbishop of Sydney
9 Nov 2008
Last week saw an important double when Australia watched the Melbourne Cup and the U.S.A. held their national elections.
The favourite won in the United States while a long shot won our most famous horse race. Barack Obama is young, while Bart Cummings and the owner of the Cup winner are elderly; but all were popular winners.
Horse racing is the sport of kings, but still has a broad constituency here in Australia. While it is a rough and ready industry, under pressure in many ways, Bart Cummings is not only a champion trainer with twelve Melbourne Cup winners, but a good man and a gentleman. It was also pleasing to see an Australian horse and trainer win in order to hold off the foreign challengers for one more year.
When I was at school, classes used to stop so we could listen to the running of the Melbourne Cup (no television then) and I find it reassuring that these old rituals survive.
The Australian media give enormous space to things American, because most of us are very interested in what happens there. It was a shock for me to discover that Australia is almost never mentioned in the U.S.A. press; a situation quite unlike England’s. Our Prime Minister will have to work very hard for President Obama to notice Australia.
The dynamics of U.S.A. governments are quire different from ours with a powerful directly elected President and no compulsory voting. Tens of millions of Americans never vote, although on this occasion we had the largest voter turnout since women obtained the vote in 1920, with an increase of 7.3% over 2004.
As a young man I remember the excitement and hope when President Kennedy was elected. We expected great things and were not entirely disappointed. American democracy is imperfect, too much influenced by money and dynasties, but it has an energy and vitality unequalled anywhere. The size of their immense crowds contrast with our small political gatherings.
Obama is a superb orator with a gift for language and a capacity to inspire loyalty and hope, but he comes to power in difficult times; world wide financial turmoil, the worst for seventy-five years, two unpopular and difficult wars and American indebtedness. And we should add Iran and North Korea.
The U.S.A. is also deeply divided by wealth and poverty, with no universal health insurance, families sometimes bankrupted by hospital bills and Third World diseases are even found in hospitals because people cannot afford to go to a doctor.
The importance of a black President for the U.S.A. and the world cannot be underestimated; especially a black President with a Muslim father. No country in Europe could produce such a result.
Hopes are high, perhaps impossibly high. As a young man Obama mixed with some of the wildest from the radical left, urban terrorists, the P.L.O. and his financial advisers include those who helped provoke the financial meltdown.
He will need to move beyond these worlds if he is to be the President Reagan of the left, to win over the middle ground in the fight for healing and prosperity.
The most disturbing aspect of his short career is his fanatical support for abortion as he possesses the most anti-life voting record of any contemporary senator.
This hostility to life contrasts strongly with his humanitarianism in many other areas.
The world will be changed by President Obama. We hope it will be changed for the better.
