What Obama win means for Oz
What does a Barack presidency mean for Australia?
The blog comes to you from Washington, where someone in the bureau has just shown me a green and gold "Australians for McCain/Palin" placard - a collector's piece if ever there was one. I've written elsewhere on the site about the racial meaning of Barack Obama's victory. What does it mean for Oz?
When I left Sydney at the weekend the opinion pages were dotted with thoughtful articles assessing the impact on American-Australian relations. No doubt the same question has been asked, with equal fascination, in every corner in the world.
But seeing as the US ambassador to Canberra admitted recently to having not read the ANZUS Treaty, the landmark security alliance that came into force in 1952 and has been the touchstone of Aussie-US relations ever since, it's hard to believe that Barack Obama has given the issue much thought. Nor, for that matter, his circle of top foreign policy advisers. (As an aside, in 2005 the US ambassador to New Zealand called it the "Anzoo treaty".)
During his short political career, there was perhaps one fleeting moment when Australia loomed in the forefront of Mr Obama's finely tuned mind, and oddly enough it came back in February 2007, on his first day as a fully fledged presidential candidate.
He was asked to respond to comments by Australia's then Prime Minister John Howard, who inserted himself into the presidential campaign by saying: "If I were running al-Qaeda in Iraq, I would put a circle around March 2008, and pray, as many times as possible, for a victory not only for Obama, but also for the Democrats."
It all proved very helpful for Mr Obama, not least because it showed he was being taken seriously by seasoned foreign leaders, and thus helped close the credibility gap with his chief rival at the time, Hillary Clinton. On the first day of his campaign, it also meant Iraq became the focus, his most vote-winning issue in the early stages of his audacious campaign.
Back then, during his days as opposition leader, Kevin Rudd was open and enthusiastic in his support for Mrs Clinton. But he'll no doubt be happy that Mr Obama has come out on top.
John McCain would have been a good friend of Australia. He spoke of the importance of Washington's tight relationship with Canberra in his first big foreign policy essay of the campaign (curiously, he did not single out London in the same, effusive way), and well remembers Australia's contribution in Vietnam.
Still, Mr Rudd will be looking to forge the kind of relationship with Mr Obama that Paul Keating cultivated with Bill Clinton (Mr Clinton helped Mr Keating elevate the diplomatic importance of Apec, for instance).
The two men already agree on Iraq - both thought it a terrible foreign policy blunder - and are of common accord about the importance of "more Afghanistan and less Iraq". Mr Rudd will be hoping for a mind-meld on other issues, too, from the need for a co-ordinated global response to climate change to the need for greater global financial regulation.
There's one area of potential conflict, and that centres on Afghanistan. As the former Labor leader Kim Beazley recently told The Australian, Mr Obama may look for a greater troop commitment from Australia (currently, there are just over a thousand diggers in Afghanistan). Over the next two years, the Dutch may pull out of Oruzgan province, where the Aussies are also based. Washington may ask Australia to plug the gap, something which Mr Rudd has indicated he is unwilling to do.
Since World War II, successive Australian governments have been willing to play a blood price to maintain a close relationship with whichever president is in the White House - in Korea, Vietnam, the Gulf and Afghanistan. How far will Mr Rudd be prepared to go to preserve Canberra's most special of relationships?
PS I loved your response to my At the Movies post. Like the inventory of music on an iPod, a list of favourite films is very revealing. I'll work my way through the ones I haven't seen over the next few months. On the flight over, I did catch the thriller The Square from the Edgerton brothers. This time appearing as a cranky property developer, Bill Hunter appeared in the first 30 seconds. Does anyone know of any movie where he pops up sooner?
I'm 
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