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As regular readers of The Panama News may know, I started out this US primary season endorsing Bill Richardson, who didn't do very well and dropped out of the race. I still think he'd make a great president, but that won't happen this year.

Now it's down to a hard fought contest between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama. I will support the Democrat in November, but as between Clinton and Obama my own preference and vote will go with the latter. Mostly it's because, like Obama, I was against the Iraq War from day one.

This difference is much more than a tactical issue dividing the two remaining Democrats. It belies a substantial difference in world view that may be hard to see while inside the United States but is highlighted for those of us living elsewhere. Do we want to continue with a set of default foreign policies set in another era, shown to be ineffective in the present and totally unsuitable if we want to move toward a better future? Yes, under George W. Bush's watch I have so often wished that we had Bill Clinton back. But extreme policies like the Helms-Burton Act that Bill Clinton signed and which only alienated the rest of the world without moving the cause of freedom in Cuba one inch; the Plan Colombian death squad offensive that didn't defeat FARC as promised; the failed War on Drugs pursued by the guy who said he didn't inhale; economic policies that ruined so many Latin American economies and prompted millions of Mexican farmers who were driven off of their land by NAFTA to illegally cross the US border in search of work --- these things I also remember about the Clinton years and quite frankly they suppress my sense of nostalgia.

America need a change in perspective when it comes to foreign policy. We're most likely to get it from somebody like Obama, who because he lived in Jakarta understood at a very early age that the rest of the world doesn't necessarily think and live like some hypothetical average American does. Obama's childhood exposure to Islam, which is the subject of much of the anonymous Republican hate spam, is to my point of view a great strength in times when the United States is threatened by Muslim fanatics who are to Islam what the Ku Klux Klan is to Christianity. His natural ability to think outside of the battered and torn old box of dubious foreign relations truisms will surely not lead him to agree with me on all issues, but it does uniquely qualify him to confront the perplexing new issues of our times and the change-resistant old business that civilization has inherited.

Ah, but who am I to throw my support to Obama at this point in the process? Just one more vote in the Democrats Abroad primary.