Obama stardust for teflon Rudd?
Though partially eclipsed by the counter-terror operation in Melbourne, two things happened this week which could influence Australian politics for many moons to come.
The President of the United States sought to align himself more closely with the Australian prime minister; and the leader of the opposition sought to distance himself from a once-obscure civil servant who he misguidedly thought had handed him the keys to The Lodge.
On the very day that the Australian media was consumed with the five arrests in Victoria, the report was released on the Ozcar affair, the rather improbable row over whether Kevin Rudd and his treasurer, Wayne Swan, granted special favours to one of their mates from Queensland, a car dealer who had leant the prime minister a ute.
Kevin Rudd was exonerated; so, too, was his treasurer; and it was Malcolm Turnbull, the opposition leader, who found himself fielding hostile questions from reporters about the fake e-mail concocted by a Treasury official, Godwin Grech, which started the whole row.
An already nervous and agitated man, Mr Grech is presently in a psychiatric ward in Canberra, which might give some indication of his mental state. Nothing he might have heard from Malcolm Turnbull would have lifted his mood. He pretty much heaped the blame for the mess on Mr Grech, who had first authored the dodgy e-mail and then handed it to Turnbull.
Peter Hartcher, the political editor of the Sydney Morning Herald, takes up the story: "Instead of trying to restore the confidence of voters, he conducted a narrow, legalistic exercise to exonerate himself. Where he needed to demonstrate a leader's largeness, he produced a lawyer's smallness. It was a missed opportunity by a man who cannot afford to miss any."
Turnbull currently has an approval rating in the 30% range, and less than a year after he took over from Brendan Nelson, there is talk of a plot to oust him. In this land of egalitarians, few people seem to warm to a man viewed by many as an elitist. After all, he not only represents the richest constituency in Australia, Wentworth in Sydney's Eastern Suburbs, but resides in its wealthiest street.
Were the blue-chip Eastern Suburbs ever to launch a secessionist movement, and declare independence from the rest of Australia, Turnbull would be an almost shoe-in for its new head of state. But it's his problems courting the city's blue-collar Western Suburbs, the home of the Howard battlers, which speak of his problems with Australia as a whole.
Perhaps people don't like what many see as a sense of entitlement, a born-to-rule mindset (even though he does not come from blue-blood stock). Perhaps he is seen as too pushy and impatient. Perhaps he is seen as the loftiest of tall poppies, and thus ripe for the felling.
Earlier this week, Mr Turnbull had a chance at public rehabilitation when ABC's Australian Story went to air - a tell-all, fly-on-the-wall, 30-minute show which allows its subjects, to a certain extent, to be the authors of their own narrative.
Happily for Australian Story, its cameras were rolling when the Ozcar story broke. Unhappily for Malcolm Turnbull, its cameras were rolling when the Ozcar story broke. On hearing the potentially cataclysmic news that the e-mail had been concocted, the first response of one of his press guys was to google the word concocted. Proof perhaps that Kevin Rudd's "education revolution" has not extended down the corridor to Malcolm Turnbull's office.
All this as Barack Obama continues to declare his love for Kevin Rudd, his new best friend. Signs of this budding romance came in a suitably romantic setting, Rome, on the fringes of the G8 summit, when Obama picked Rudd to accompany him at the podium in a press conference about climate change (think two bullet points about programmatic specificity rather than two coins in the fountain).
And proof of their mateship has come from Kurt Campbell, the US Assistant Secretary of State for the Asia Pacific Region. He was speaking on ABC's 730 Report: "One of the things that's been interesting in this new political generation, that President Barack Obama, when he spends and looks around the globe, one of the people he feels most comfortable with, to talk about climate change, about the role of government in modern societies, issues associated with the rise of China, the person he thinks about when these issues comes up is Prime Minister Rudd.
"And so for those of us who care a lot about the US-Australian relationship, we are extraordinarily pleased that there is not only a personal chemistry between these two men, but a meeting of the minds on the issues that frankly I believe are at the centre of global politics."
As the orchestra in the background reaches its mighty crescendo, Kurt Campbell goes on: "Really in many respects, for President Obama, Prime Minister Rudd is already one of the his best mates."
It is regularly remarked upon how Kevin Rudd is Teflon-coated. Now he has been sprinkled with Obama stardust. The US president has clearly decided who he thinks will emerge the winner from the next Australian federal election.
So two questions: what explains America's apparent affection for Kevin Michael Rudd, and what explains Australia's apparent disaffection with Malcolm Bligh Turnbull?
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