There were parts of the book that made me cringe – the stuff about his family and how much he loved his wife was all a bit saccharine for my tastes. His criticisms of corporate America’s disproportionate influence on politics due to the money it was able to pour in was reassuring, if only because he noticed it might be a problem. There were parts of this book that gave me slight cause for hope – it did seem like he might try to do something about education, and might even help people retrain to get better jobs. Medicare may not be perfect, but God save us from the US system! The US Health System (if that is not an oxymoron) rightly frightens the life out of us – we, at least, have some semblance of a national health system. One of our biggest worries is that we might be becoming more like America. From reading this book it also seems clear that we do community better here than the US does. We are both ‘frontier’ societies with a history of appalling treatment of our native peoples – but I think we have made a better stab at multiculturalism than has been the case in the US.

It is an odd thing how different Australians are from Americans. Naturally, my politics and his are quite different – I’m to his extreme left, but I thought I should find out more about him just the same. Recently I did an online quiz to pick which candidate I would be most likely to vote for – as an Australian this was purely an academic exercise – but it said I should support Obama. I’m assuming Obama will be the next President of the USA.

The audacity of hope