I hoped another Republican would win the next presidency. Huckabee, or Romney. One of these typical dumbshit fucknozzles who’d sink the United States even deeper into misery. With Bush, this worked really well.

The evil Bush/Cheney clique has damaged the standing of the United States in the rest of the world to a point where very few actually care about what the US wants. In Latin America - widely ignored by Bush et al - this has created space in which progressive governments like those of Chavez in Venezuela and Correa in Ecuador could be elected. Peace in the Middle East is only possible if the US, forced by insurgents and its own misreading of the war there, tones it down. With another 4 or 8 years of blind Republican policies, the military would be firmly tied down in the Iraq nightmare, unable to invade anywhere else, I figured (and anyway, since WW2 the US has not been able to invade and control anything bigger than, say, Grenada or Panama). To top it off, a Republican would further destroy America’s economic power as well. Unfortunate for Americans, but a blessing for the rest of the world.

However, over the last month or so I’ve changed my mind. And that is because of Obama. I’ve come to believe, listening to him, that if there ever was an opportunity to take America around and turn it into a decent country, it is now, with him. The wave of progressive elected leaders that started in the South of the Americas has reached the Northern shores with the rise of Obama.

People compare him with John F. Kennedy, but I am constantly being reminded of what I read about Huey Long, and it surprises me enormously that NONE of the US media has drawn the obvious analogy, which includes floods and hurricane Katrina. From Greg Palast’s “Armed Madhouse“:

In 1927, the Democratic Party had died and was awaiting burial. As depression approached, the coma-Dems, like Franklin Roosevelt, called for, of all things, balancing the budget.

Then, as the Mississippi waters rose, one politician, the state’s electricity regulator, stood up on the back of a flatbed truck rigged with loudspeakers, and said, roughly, “Listen up! They’re lying! The President’s lying! The rich fat jackals that are drowning you will do it again and again and again. They lead you into imperialist wars for profit, they take away your schools and your hope, and when you complain, they blame Blacks and Jews and immigrants. Then they drown your kids. I say, Kick’m in the ass and take your share of the wealth you created.” Huey Long was our Hugo Chávez, and he laid out a plan: a progressive income tax, real money for education, public works to rebuild Louisiana and America, Social Security old age pensions, veterans’ benefits, regulation of the big utility holding companies, an end to what he called, “rich men’s wars,” and an end to the financial royalism of the One Percent.

He even had the audacity to suggest that the poor’s votes should count, calling for the end to the poll tax four decades before Martin Luther King succeeded in ending it. Long recorded his motto as a musical anthem: “Everyman a King.”

The waters receded, the anger did not, and, in 1928, Huey “Kingfish” Long was elected Governor of Louisiana. At the time, Louisiana schools were free, but not the textbooks. The elite liked it that way, but Long didn’t. To pay for the books, the Kingfish levied a special tax on Big Oil. But the oil companies refused to pay for the textbooks. Governor Long then ordered the National Guard to seize the oil fields in the Delta.

It was Huey Long who established the principle that a government of the people must protect the people, school them, build the infrastructure, regulate industry and share the nation’s wealth-and that meant facing down “the concentrations of monopoly power” of the corporate aristocracy-”the thieves of Wall Street,” as he called them.

In other words, Huey Long founded the modern Democratic Party. FDR and the party establishment, scared witless of Long’s ineluctable march to the White House, adopted his program, albeit diluted, called it the New Deal and later the New Frontier and the Great Society. America and the party prospered. What happened to the Kingfish? As with Chávez, the oil industry and local oligarchs had few options for responding to Governor Long’s populist appeal and the success of his egalitarian economic program. On September 8, 1935, Huey Long, by then a U.S. Senator, was shot dead. He was 42.

Today, Tuesday February 5th., is what Al Giordano calls “Tsunami Tuesday", with a vast number of states voting on who the Democrat’s candidate will be. But it is much more than that: In the rest of the world, it is a referendum on the United States. A test. Will they have the insight and decency to elect a leader who doesn’t threaten us with pre-emptive strikes, nuclear attacks, embargoes, or landings on the beach of my home country because they don’t care about international law? Will they elect someone who will stop kidnapping our citizens because of their “war on terror"? Will they elect a leader who will stop telling us whom WE can elect and whom we can’t? Will they elect someone who maybe feels and will express a bit of remorse, not just for “our fallen heroes” but also for the slaughter of over 80,000 innocents in Iraq? Someone who acknowledges the difference between a dead soldier and a dead child?

These primaries, and the presidential elections later this year, are a litmus test on the morality, the ethics of the United States and its people. Forget Clinton, she is just more of the same and electing her won’t do. Clinton keeps talking about how she will be Commander in Chief. She almost drools when she uses that term. “We bombed them and bombed them,” she said recently in a debate. She was talking about her husband of course, and Iraq. Those were the days, you saw her thinking. If she gets elected the rest of the world will just shrug and continue minding its own business, turning away from the US. Even with Obama, we’ll have our reservations - all this talk coming from Kennedy with phrases like “leader of the world” and all that aren’t very comforting, just like I didn’t appreciate Obama talking about Iran “behaving better". I think the US would do well to give up that idea of them being leaders and policemen of the world for a decade or two. At least.

But Obama has made it clear that he wants to talk to adversaries instead of firing rockets at them, and that should be progress. He talks a lot like Huey Long as reported by Greg Palast. History could be in the making.