I take an active interest in American politics, and their economy, because so much of what happens there affects us and because I’m half American too. Born in Los Angeles and lived here and there including three years in Chicago which is where I first heard of Barack Obama, an inspirational and highly intelligent politician.

It is on the basis that several months ago I made the first political donation of my life, and it was to his campaign. Naturally I was absolutely delighted to see him win the Iowa caucus. The Iowa caucus is considered to be an early indicator of who will gain the nomination of their political party. Sometimes the losers win out, Bill Clinton (my favourite president since George Washington) only got 2% in the Iowa caucus in 1992.

However, only once since 1974 has the winner of the Iowa caucus actually won the election and that was George Bush, although he didn’t really win the election so I don’t know if it counts or not. Hopefully the next president won’t be a half-witted hillbilly and given the line up of hopefuls I think that is a distinct possiblity.

This blog is about many things, finance being the main one, sometimes I can’t help take the odd potshot though. I remember when G.W. got in for a second term…. I was disgusted, I think the best way to describe it is that I had an emotion similar to Michelle Bass from Big Brother 5 when she said ‘No naked jacuzziness!’ except I was screaming at the television ‘there will be no more redneck presidents!’ anyways, I digress.

Barack Obama has a long way to go before he might sit in the Oval Office, and there are plenty of hurdles which may stymie any of the candidates including Huckabee who won for the Republicans. A few things that are worth noting is that the USA only has two political parties, the Democrats and the Republicans, everybody else is an ‘Independent’, interestingly enough we actually have many more in Ireland despite the fact that there are about 70 Americans for every Irish person.

Secondly is the fact that everybody keeps talking about Obama as a ‘Black’ president, this is only part true, he is half white and was raised exclusively by his very white mother (Condoleeza Rice is a similar example). The thing that people should really focus on is that race is not the issue, its integration that is the issue, and Obama is a good example of the possibility for that change, I genuinely think he might be the man to actually make some changes and not just talk about it.

I have always maintained that the bigger the middle class the better things will be, Obama seems to embrace that rationale as well (I just can’t say enough good things about him!), indeed in practice countries with a large middle class are the success stories around the world, even in South America this is the case, the country with the most stable economy is Uruguay and they have the largest precentage of middle class citizens on that continent. You can look at Obama’s economic policy by clicking here.

He also wants to increase manufacturing, an excellent way to diversify away from an economy that is based on consumer spending, and whats more? He wants to see the manufacturing happen in sectors like ‘green energy’.

He also makes specific points about reformation of the mortgage market to put an end to mortgage fraud. (I’ll do a post on this later as I don’t know that much about American mortgage fraud).

Could we be in for the first black president of the United States? Let me say this: if he wins I don’t care about colour, I’ll be satisfied that we’ll be witnessing the first ‘compitent and intelligent’ president in the last eight years.