Hillary-Obama dream ticket

2008 may well see history being made. There is every possibility that the United States will elect its first woman President when elections are held next November. Most opinion polls show Hillary Clinton way ahead (at 41 per cent in a recent Washington Post poll) of her main rival for the Democratic Presidential nomination, Illinois Senator Barack Obama (17 per cent), the most engaging black to contest an American Presidential election.

Primaries will begin later this year and by next March it will be fairly clear who will be the Democratic nominee. Hillary Clinton has a formidable electoral machinery, partly inherited from her husband, former President Bill Clinton.  She leans (by conservative American political standards) to the left of centre and has stated recently that she will pull American troops out of Iraq if she becomes President. Thus the US Presidential election will be watched by the rest of the world, especially the Middle-East, more closely than any other in the past.

Hillary’s Achilles Heel is her left-centrist views in an increasingly right-wing America. There is a growing groundswell of support in the US for neo-conservatism across political and social issues: anti-abortion, anti-gay marriage, anti-gun laws. Hillary’s 2002-03 Senate vote in favour of the Iraq war is also being used by her Republican opponents and the powerful US right-wing press to attack her ‘hypocrisy’ on now taking a cut-and-run stand on Iraq.

But the Republicans are Hillary’s biggest strength as well — simply because of the alarming shortage of a charismatic Republican candidate to challenge her bid. The two Republican frontrunners are Arizona Senator John McCain, a respected Vietnam war veteran, and Rudolph Giuliani, the former two-term mayor of New York who performed heroically during and after the 9/11 terrorist attack on America’s financial centre.

But both McCain and Giuliani are past their best and the former New York mayor is recovering from cancer.

My guess is that Hillary will beat Obama for the Democratic nomination and then offer him a vice-presidential slot on what would then be a dream ticket: an experienced centrist woman Senator and a charismatic first-term black Senator. The combination is formidable and could deliver a very different kind of American leadership over the next few years.

For India, in the process of building a new and constructive relationship with the US, the outcome of the Presidential election could be crucial. Bush’s Republican cabinet has been cooperative with India over the past six years. But a Hillary-Obama administration promises an even more progressive relationship between the world’s two largest democracies.

Both countries are in the midst of flux. The US is rapidly becoming a multi-ethnic nation and one of the few Western countries with a rising population. India too is in the throes of great change: economic, political and social. China hovers over the India-US equation like a colossus. To the US, China is a superpower rival to be kept in check just as the former Soviet Union was during the cold war. To India, China is a partner as much as a competitor.

India can leverage American anxiety over its ambiguous and evolving relationship with China to wring concessions from Washington where necessary. The Indo-US nuclear deal is the first target where negotiations over the so-called 1-2-3 Agreement will soon begin. India can use the China card to ensure that the outgoing Bush administration drops those clauses from the nuclear deal which constrain India’s nuclear weaponisation and sovereign testing programme.

India has two other major issues with the US. First, Washington’s continued blind-eye to Pakistan’s covert assistance to terrorists acting against India. And second, the rigid American stand on the huge farm subsidies it pays to its agricultural sector which have driven thousands of Indian farmers to penury and suicide.

Indian policymakers have dealt with the Bush administration with reasonable skill over the past few years. But with the Congress-led UPA coalition government likely to be returned to office in the May 2009 general election, barely four months after the new US President is sworn in, now is the time to prepare a comprehensive blueprint to engage the new-look Hillary-Obama administration, which is likely to emerge, in a dialogue with a strong Indian accent.

Email: minhazmerchant@business-leaders.com