First Lady Laura Bush has informed Janette Howard that, sadly, she will be unable to attend the upcoming APEC summit due to a pinched nerve. However will the show go on?
Janette Howard is of course the wife of Australian Prime Minister John Howard, who will be hosting George W. Bush and other regional leaders at the APEC meeting in Sydney this September. Howard has for the past few years been living in the shadow of Tony Blair as one of Dubbya's international cadre of professional bootlickers. He gained some notoriety recently when he quite gratuitously offered up his thoughts on Barack Obama's presidential candidacy.
"If I were running al-Qaeda in Iraq, I would put a circle around March 2008 and be praying as many times as possible for a victory not only for Obama but also for the Democrats."
On the domestic front, Howard is feeling some political heat. Richard Farmer (former advisor to PM Bob Hawke) has offered Howard some perspective...with a Canadian twist.
[In 2004] Minority government seemed comfortably within the Conservative grasp. So, there was plenty of egg on lots of faces, especially those of political journalists and pollsters, when the [Paul Martin] Liberals were returned to office, albeit with a decline in members, having gained 37 percent of the national vote. That six percentage point error, where the predicted vote of 31 per cent became 37 per cent, is the kind of boost John Howard needs.Farmer's examples are a tad on the irrelevant side. Although both had to battle voter fatigue with their respective parties, neither Martin in '04 nor Campbell in '93 were in the same situation as Howard, who is currently vying for his own 5th term as PM. But isn't it interesting that the debacle of Kim Campbell's campaign trainwreck, fourteen years later, still manages to echo in halls of punditry down under?
Keep plugging away John, but don't think about the Canadian election of 1993 when a Conservative Government did the same thing and ended up with two members in a Parliament of 295!
