As the US. Presidential election draws near, some Caribbean leaders are jumping off the political fence. Some are doing it in more direct ways than their colleagues. And while they haven’t hit the campaign trail in the United States to stump for the Democratic standard-bearer Barack Obama, Dr. Ralph Gonsalves, St. Vincent’s Prime Minister, Barbados’ leader, David Thompson and Guyana’s President Dr. Bharrat Jagdeo have sent a clear message: Obama should be the next occupant of the White House in Washington instead of Republican John McCain.
“If we have an Obama presidency, which I am hoping that we have, and I don’t mind saying that, and I am not interfering in United States politics, but I like his emphasis on multilateralism and, if I may say, his desire to have conversations with people, even with those with whom he bitterly disagrees in this modern world,” stated Dr. Gonsalves, in his support for Obama, while exchanging ideas with the New York Carib News editorial board, in Manhattan.
That strong endorsement came a month after the Barbados leader attended the Democratic National Convention in Denver, where Senator Obama was officially chosen as the party’s presidential nominee. Thompson, who issued an invitation to Obama to visit Barbados whether or not he wins the presidency in November, had said a few months earlier, at an editorial board meeting in New York, that he understood Obama’s approach because they shared a fact of life: they were the sons of white mothers and Black fathers; therefore, he understood what the Democrat was going through.
But Guyana President Jagdeo went a step further. He told a Caribbean Diaspora forum, at York College of the City University of New York, during the Caribbean leader’s conference in June, that he would like to see a U.S. leader who looked like the Caribbean immigrants in the audience in Queens, meaning persons of color.
Interestingly, Dr. Gonsalves also used his presence in the City to make it clear where his sentiments lay. Addressing diplomatic and consular officials, business executives and Caribbean community leaders at a meeting of the Carib News editorial board in Manhattan, the St. Vincent and the Grenadines Prime Minister praised Obama for his “remarkable” quality of leadership, which, he said, would be good for America and the world as a whole. In an unusual public statement for a foreign head of government on American soil at election time, Dr. Gonsalves said that what was appealing in Obama’s case was his ability to bring out the best qualities in people with whom he comes into contact.
“I naturally would like to see Obama, if I may say it parenthetically, and I haven’t seen the news media here [in the United States] analyze it as yet, is that they speak of Obama as a man who is inspirational. But John McCain is inspirational and so too is Hillary Clinton. But Obama has a quality of leadership which is remarkable in that he just doesn’t put in, he listens, he draws out of people [those qualities], which are good and noble in them ... and which people themselves do not as yet know that they possess ... That is something I see in this young man. Unfortunately, I haven’t seen the analysis in that regard from the mainstream media in the United States.”
In a way, argued Gonsalves, that quality explained his victory in the early Democratic caucuses in Iowa. As Dr. Gonsalves saw it, Obama was victorious because he tapped into the “hearts and souls and brought out things” from the whites that “were noble in them, which they themselves did not realize that they possessed. It is not a strange phenomenon, because in each human being there is goodness and nobility, even when it resides alongside backwardness and prejudice.”
The Prime Minister saw evidence of that in the Democrat when he spoke about his white maternal grandmother. Some people might have tried to laugh at Obama’s picture of his grandmother, but it wasn’t a laughing matter.
“If I were to advise, I would advise [Obama supporters] to address that in the final weeks of the campaign,” said the Vincentian leader.
Interestingly enough, Thompson had used the ethnic question at the start of the Democratic Labor Party’s election campaign in Barbados in January, to underscore what he saw was the confusion that often arose when politicians of bi-racial backgrounds seek high office. He said then that some African Americans didn’t consider Obama to be “Black enough,” while some whites didn’t view him as being “white enough,” for their political taste buds.
Jamaica Prime Minister Bruce Golding, who also came to New York to address the UN and his country’s nationals, avoided the subject of the U.S. Presidential race when he addressed guests at a luncheon of the Jamaica American Chamber of Commerce.
