These are my top ten reasons why I strongly believe that a President Obama would be highly successful in international relations, much more so than either Hillary Clinton or John McCain.

1. There’s no doubt that Sen. Barack Obama has more global appeal than any other candidate for President. He’s the son of an African immigrant and a woman from Kansas, which represents an obvious departure from the past.

2. Obama has lived in other countries and traveled abroad extensively, and as a result fully understands many other cultures particularly in Southeast Asia, Africa, and the Middle East.

3. Obama studied international relations in college and consequently understands important nuances of foreign policy. He has brought his academic expertise to the U.S. Foreign Relations committee and has worked in a bipartisan fashion to chart a new American foreign policy. For example, Obama spearheaded the effort – along with Republican Senator Richard Luger – to emphasize the importance of helping eliminate “loose nukes” in Russia and Eastern Europe – a project that had been vastly under-funded by the Bush Administration.

4. He has seen poverty and related social problems firsthand on a daily basis as a community organizer on the streets of Chicago and will have a greater understanding of comparable Third World issues as a result. His experience at the grassroots level in the U.S. will enable him to devise viable, innovative solutions to global problems as poverty, hunger, lack of adequate health care, infant mortality, AIDS, organized crime, and homelessness.

5. He has credibility in the world because he opposed the Iraq War from the very beginning (unlike Hillary Clinton) and understood in 2002 that Bush’s pre-emptive war in Iraq would seriously hurt America’s standing in the world. After all, the Iraq War is the Number One reason why the U.S. has become so incredibly unpopular in recent years.

6. Obama has clearly demonstrated good judgment in such foreign policy decisions, unlike Hillary and McCain – who made the worst foreign policy decision in decades when they voted to authorize Bush’s invasion of Iraq.

7. Obama is highly diplomatic in his personal style and never shrill or temperamental (unlike McCain and Hillary), which will help win back good will around the world. He doesn’t lose his cool or cry “shame” when he disagrees with someone. Rather, Obama knows how to bring people together and forge compromises – and this characteristic will help him immensely in any diplomatic initiatives he undertakes with foreign governments.

8. Obama is willing to meet with virtually any leader in the world without unnecessary
bureaucratic preconditions (unlike Hillary and McCain), thereby signaling a new, more open, stance for American foreign policy. He understands that the U.S. never stopped meeting with Soviet leaders during the Cold War, so why should we not meet with our enemies today? He contends that adequate preparation for such meetings is absolutely necessary, but continuing the obstructionist saber-rattling cowboy antics of the Bush Administration (as Hillary seems to favor) will get us nowhere.

9. Obama knows how to prioritize national security concerns (unlike Bush, McCain, and Hillary) and will act accordingly in shifting the emphasis in the war on terror back to Afghanistan/Pakistan, where it truly belongs. Of course, he will also use his diplomatic skills to help bring together disparate Iraqi factions and fully involve Iraq’s Muslim neighbors and the United Nations in a multilateral effort to achieve lasting stability in the region.

10. Electing Barack Obama as President will be a clear and unambiguous signal to the world that the U.S. is charting a brand new course. Rather than looking backwards, the U.S. will be moving forward with fresh new ideas and innovative bipartisan approaches in foreign policy.

So what? This doesn’t make her a foreign policy expert. The truth is, no one enters the presidency with all the answers.

The job of a president is to ask the very best men and women to serve the American people by accepting cabinet positions. Obviously, this hasn’t worked too well the past 8 years, but that is another subject.

Seriously, I do not see how anyone can make the claim that the media is biased against Clinton when nobody seems to take her to task for trying to sell us on this “35 years of experience” snake oil.

Hell, five minutes on the internet is all that’s needed to show that Obama’s been an elected official longer than her.

Recently Senator Clinton stated that Senator McCain brings a “lifetime” of experience, she brings “35 years” of experience, and Senator Obama brings a “speech from 2002.” How, exactly, does the “lifetime” and the “35 years” become validation or qualification of experience for two of the candidates and the “20+ years” of Senator Obama become a “speech”? If two of the three candidates count experience over the course of their “working years” that began upon successful completion of a collegiate career, why then does the same not apply to Mr. Obama? If “experience” begins upon arriving in Washington, would it then be correct to say that Senator McCain’s military service is not qualified experience because it occurred before Washington? Or, further, that Senator Clinton’s work with the Children’s Defense Fund (18 months or so) and the like is not qualified experience because it occurred before Washington?

A rule that won’t measure but one way won’t due to build by. This was something my grandfather taught his children and grandchildren. This was to teach us the value of principle, integrity, and fairness. The “experience” that both Senators Clinton and McCain hold up for voters to admire as the foundation for being president of the United States is significantly diminished if “before Washington” is the standard that “we the people” are to take their measures.

Because president of the United States is a unique job which only offers “experience” to those who have held the job, how does experience in any public, private, non-profit, or volunteer endeavor earn any presidential candidate “experience”? Besides, the Constitution of the United States specifically outlines the qualifications / requirements to be president: “No person except a natural born Citizen, or a Citizen of the United States, shall be eligible to the Office of President; neither shall any Person be eligible to that Office who shall not have attained to the Age of thirty-five Years, and been fourteen Years a Resident within the United States”. My reading of the Constitution offers no “experience” requirement.