The Sydney Morning Herald

 
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At the risk of harping...One last thing on Rudd at the White House

I wrote yesterday about Australia's cultural cringe, and how it is often expressed as a desire for validation by bigger countries. Well, today one of Australia's largest newspapers, The Sydney Morning Herald, provided some evidence. Here is the lede to their story about Rudd's White House visit, entitled "New Best Friends Have a Great Meeting of the Minds":

Barack Obama delivered Kevin Rudd the ultimate compliment yesterday by citing the Prime Minister while defending his own approach to the global financial crisis. During a live, nationally televised press conference that had been hyped by the US media for days, Obama was asked about criticisms from the Europeans and US Republicans about stimulus packages and the debt they induce.

"I was with Kevin Rudd, the Prime Minister of Australia, today," Obama said, and Rudd was "very forceful" in suggesting countries which could afford to do so should stimulate demand.It was not a bad plug, coming only hours after Obama described their Oval Office meeting as "a great meeting of the minds" and a day after the US Treasury Secretary, Tim Geithner, in an unscripted moment, described Rudd's approach to the crisis as "incredibly A-plus".

Also - in your face Britain. We totally got a better gift than you. From the SMH:

And while the British were complaining about the lousy gift of DVDs Obama gave Brown last week, there were no such complaints yesterday from either delegation. Rudd gave Obama a personally signed and inscribed copy of Thomas Keneally's biography of Abraham Lincoln, and Obama gave Rudd a rare original printing of sheet music, the Anacreontic Song, by John Smith, nowadays better known as the Star Spangled Banner.

 

 

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Katie Connolly joined NEWSWEEK in June 2007, working for NEWSWEEK's international editions. In September 2007, she was assigned to cover Republican presidential candidates for Newsweek's special election issue and book. For this project, Katie was detached from the weekly magazine and her reporting was embargoed until after election day. As a result, she gained exclusive, behind-the-scenes access to the McCain campaign.

Now based in DC, Katie was named Political Correspondent in November 2008 and covers the White House and Capitol Hill.

Katie received her Master of Public Policy from Harvard's Kennedy School of Government, where she was the 2005 Menzies Scholar. She received her Bachelor of Arts from the University of Queensland and completed her honors thesis on media representations of the East Timor conflict at the University of Melbourne. She was born and raised in Brisbane, Australia.

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