Barack Obama: America's Tony Blair? (The Guardian, UK)

Obama echoes Blair in many ways. But will he realise that being elected is not an end in itself?

In the normal run of things, you'd expect to find British spin doctors - for Brown, for Cameron - taking their seats in the convention stalls for America's big election, then taking notes. Anything you can do, we can nick better. But this year the cycle seems to have spun into reverse as what went around comes around again. In short, eerily enough, Obama 2008 begins to trail memories of Blair 1997.

This isn't a tidy thesis to turn into some quick book, instantly remaindered before Christmas. But consider: our principals are both young, slim, wonderfully eloquent lawyers (who never really practised), and both won by walloping margins, replacing leaders wracked by financial calamity and ideological exhaustion. New Labour, New Britain. New Barack, New Change, the change we need, the yes-we-can mantra. Gently, however, remember what comes next.

The president-elect has filled 35 of his most important administration jobs already: he's gone further and faster than any of his immediate predecessors. And nothing signals more clearly the true nature of the man, and his intended course, than the people choices he makes. Obama, the wildest liberal in the Senate? Forget it. Obama, the rash? Don't bother to ponder it. What we see, here assembling, is a team of the honed, the tried, the tested, the effortlessly superior: talented centrists going on total pragmatists.

FULL ARTICLE