OBAMA SHAKES IT UP

American presidential election campaigns are unique among the world's
democracies in that they never stop. No sooner is a new president
sworn in than contending hopefuls begin campaigning to succeed him.
It is almost two years before the next presidential election but the
business has already begun.

The announcement by Illinois Senator Barak Obama on Saturday that he
will seek the nomination for the Democratic Party puts all the
serious contenders in the field.

Obama has few obvious qualifications to be president -- in fact, he
appears to have none. He does have, on the other hand, some baggage;
not political issues, but personal ones. He is black, and there has
never been a serious black contender for the presidency in U.S.
history. He is young and inexperienced, with only two years as a
senator on his curriculum vitae, not much to qualify him to be in
charge of the world's richest and most powerful nation.

His middle name is Hussein, which does not sit any better with many
Americans than if it were Ho Chi Minh or Hugo Chavez. His wife still
makes him take out the garbage and has demanded he quit smoking --
two packs a day, according to reports.

He admits to having used marijuana and cocaine.

None of these issues, singularly or together, are a disqualification
for being president.

Most of them are frivolous, or should be, but in an American
presidential election, nothing is frivolous -- everything speaks to
"character." Curiously, the most serious impediment, in a world where
smokers are regarded as lepers once were, may be the tobacco addiction.

The only one that should concern thoughtful voters, however, is his
lack of experience. In his declaration speech on Saturday, however,
he showed how he hopes to turn even that to his advantage. His
ambition to be the next president, he admitted, was both audacious
and presumptuous: "I know I haven't spent a lot of time learning the
ways of Washington. But I've been there long enough to know that the
ways of Washington must change."

Young, smart and attractive, Obama has been touted as the black John
F. Kennedy, a new generation, a new voice, a new face for American
politics. He still trails Hillary Clinton in the polls, but it is
early days yet and Americans appear to be more receptive to a black
president than a female one.

As a presidential candidate almost too well known to the voting
public, Ms. Clinton carries a lot of baggage herself, but polls
indicate that if an election were to be held today, she and
Republican Rudy Giuliani, the former mayor of New York, would be in a
dead heat, followed respectively by Obama and John McCain. Obama's
formal declaration, however, shakes everything up. It promises the
most compelling presidential election in years, an election in which
the likeliest winner is either an African-American or a woman.

Say what you like about the United States, but no other nation offers
its voters such a vigorous and mature democracy.