US election fever

View from 555 California Street, San Francisco, where we held a 2-day meeting with McKinsey and Co and experts on climate change.


Back safe in Copenhagen after the intensive 4-day trip to Mexico City and San Francisco (my body has no idea what time it is). Mexico City is one huge city... with an amazing historic centre sporting intricate architecture. Unfortunately Montezuma got his revenge in early, meaning I was quarantined to my hotel room for 18 hours as I experienced a bout of food poisoning (thanks Aero Mexicana!), so my experience of the city was limited.. However, I did get to see the Congress and meet with the heads of the three main political parties plus the Speaker and Chairs of eight Congressional Committees. There is immense interest in climate change in the Mexican Congress and they have an impressive national action plan to reduce their own emissions and deal with the impacts. It bodes well for our Americas forum in November, to take place in Mexico City.

After seemingly only just arriving we were off again to San Francisco. With the US election looming it was interesting to see the media coverage and talk to Americans about their political preferences. Our visit coincided with the Republican Convention and the speeches of VP candidate Sarah Palin and Republican nominee, Senator John McCain. Palin is an intriguing characater - she is young, relatively unknown on the political scene (as Governor of Alaska) and has some 'interesting' views. She wants Creationism to be taught alongside evolution theory in schools, she is against abortion under any circumstances (even rape or incest), is a gun-toting Moose hunter and does not believe in man-made climate change. In short she appeals to the Republican base, many of whom have doubts about McCain's tendency towards that dirty word - "liberalism" - so in many ways she is the ideal choice to shore up the Republican vote. To me she is scary and I find it very difficult to believe that a European country would put someone who doesn't believe in evolution into a position of such power, and it reinforces my view that, as a Brit, I share many more values and cultural ties with Europe than with the US.

The bounce in the polls from the Republican Convention puts the two candidates - Senators John McCain and Barack Obama - almost neck and neck. It really is going to be a close race between now and November. I can't help thinking that someone is going to make a decisive gaff between now and then and, given Joe Biden's (Obama's VP choice) history of inserting his foot in his mouth, it could be him..!

San Francisco is a very liberal city so there was strong support for Obama with merchandise being sold seemingly on every street corner. But the US is a diverse country and, although the educated liberals on the east and west coasts will almost certainly vote heavily in favour of Obama, the large swathes of the population in places like Texas will almost certainly vote Republican, even more so now that they are energised by the feisty Palin.

Given the global impact the policies of the US president have, I almost feel as if the rest of the world should get a share of the vote!

In the meantime, check out this great animation from those cads at JibJab - a summary of the US election in 3 minutes. Class.

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PS In answer to my question in the last post, we flew around Hurricane Gustav- avoiding the centre and the eye and crossing over the outer 'tails'. It was still a bit bumpy!