Heine Barack Obama has captured the imagination of Caribbean peoples like no US candidate for the presidency since John F. Kennedy. The region's top artistes, from the Mighty Sparrow ("the respect of the world we now lack/if you want it back, vote Barack", read the lyrics of his Barack the Magnificent) to Cocoa Tea, sing his praises.
In this they are hardly alone: Germans, with fewer obvious reasons to be enamoured of the Democratic presidential candidate, are just as charmed - witness the 200,000-strong crowd gathered to listen to him in Berlin in July, one bigger than any he has had at home. Journalist Josef Joffe has described German fascination with Obama as quasi-religious.
Ergo, little attention has been paid to what a victory by Senator John McCain, come November, would entail for the Western Hemisphere and for the Caribbean. Yet, given how close the race for the White House is (after the Republican Convention, McCain received a bump in the polls, according to the latest ABC/Washington Post poll the race is now tied, with 47 per cent for Obama and 46 per cent for McCain among registered voters; McCain leads among likely voters by 49 per cent to 47 per cent), this is a mistake. Post-convention bumps in the polls are notoriously fickle, but most observers agree that we are in for another very close election, much like in 2000 and 2004.
Democratic presidential candidate Senator Barack Obama (right) joins Republican presidential candidate Senator John McCain. - AP
a McCain presidency
What would a McCain presidency mean for the region?
Some caveats first. The most significant ripple effects from any new US administration on its neighbours are likely to come from the overall policy package to be applied by the new team - fiscal and other measures to push the US economy out of its present doldrums, winding down (or up) the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, coming up with an energy policy, one on immigration, on international trade policy, and so on. Moreover, the region has never loomed very large on Washington's radar screens, so that it is unlikely to receive much high-level attention at first anyway.
How much change (that magical word, now the mantra of both candidates) is a President John McCain likely to bring to US policy toward the Caribbean?
There is one subject where we won't see any: US policy towards Cuba. Both from his statements and from his advisers, many of them, like Otto Reich, drawn from the Cuban-American community, one can conclude that a McCain administration would follow an even harder line on Cuba than the one of George W. Bush. The embargo is unlikely to be lifted - despite the eloquent criticisms of it by regional leaders like Prime Minister Bruce Golding - and we won't see any high-level talks among US and Cuban government officials, at least in the short term.
more flexible administration
On the other hand, Republicans have traditionally been more supportive of free trade than Democrats. In fact, Obama's sharp criticisms of NAFTA have gone well beyond what any serious presidential candidate since Ross Perot had ever voiced. Accordingly, if it comes to extending and further expanding the reach of what is left of the Caribbean Basin Initiative for CARICOM, that is, various mechanisms that facilitate preferential trade access to the US market, a McCain administration might well be more flexible and approachable than one led by Obama. There are many good reasons why informed observers consider that a Democrat in the White House would be a good thing both for the United States and for the Caribbean. Free trade is not one of them.
Another critical area is migration. And if the Caribbean is a region of migrants, this is especially so for the Commonwealth Caribbean. As Docquier and Marfouk have shown, the top 10 countries in the Americas with the highest share of college-age migrants to OECD countries are all from CARICOM (Guyana heads the pack with 89 per cent, followed by Jamaica and Grenada with 85.1 per cent; others on the list are St Vincent, Haiti, Trinidad & Tobago, St Kitts & Nevis, St Lucia, Antigua & Barbuda and Belize). Would McCain have a more flexible and humane immigration policy than the one being applied now, in which Mexican-Americans born near the border in midwife-assisted births are denied passports on that ground alone? McCain has occasionally been shown to be a maverick on this, but has retreated in the face of the heavy anti-immigration rhetoric of his party. The jury is still out on this one.
McCain has been quite explicit in his support for rebuilding Haiti, praising the partnership with Brazil under MINUSTAH. One would therefore think that Haiti, where the first UN peacekeeping operation manned by a majority of Latin American troops is now entering its fourth year, would continue to be a priority for the US.
intriguing question
An intriguing question is raised by the so-called 'League of Democracies', one of McCain's pet projects. In addition to expelling Russia from the G-8, Senator McCain has also proposed the creation of this other outfit, one that would allow the democracies of the world to get together and strategise without having to do so in the presence of non-democratic nations like China and Russia, as it happens in the United Nations Security Council.
Though many specialists are critical of this proposal (one, moreover, that duplicates the already existing Community of Democracies) as the main issue is how to create more inclusive international groupings that work (as opposed to more restrictive ones), it could presumably be one in which CARICOM nations could play a significant role, given the extent to which democratic institutions have taken root in the region.
Ironically, the one argument that could make the broader Caribbean most receptive to John McCain's candidacy is one he never mentions in his extensive autobiographical speeches: he was actually born in what is now Panama and was in 1936 the Panama Canal Zone.
Jorge Heine is Professor of Global Governance at Wilfrid Laurier University and a Distinguished Fellow at the Centre for International Governance Innovation in Waterloo, Ontario. He currently serves as vice-president of the International Political Science Association. Feedback may be sent to columns@gleanerjm.com.
