Hugo Chavéz Does Barack Obama a Favour

In his quest for the White House, there are some endorsements Barack Obama can do without and today the Venezuelan leader, Hugo Chavez, did him a favor.

Chavez, who in the past implied that he favored Obama over his Republican rival, John McCain, today declared a plague on both their houses.

In a speech to supporters, Chavez said there was no difference between the two and that US-Venezuela relations would not improve if Obama won in November. The problem, Chavez said, was the nature of the US itself.

"Let's not kid ourselves, it is the empire and the empire must fall. That's the only solution, that it comes to an end."

Thank heaven, will be the reaction of the Obama campaign, where there is a concerted effort to project a more hawkish image of their man and shed the earlier more dovish vibes.

There will also be relief that Hamas, the Palestinian Islamist group, has lost its earlier enthusiasm for their man, especially since a speech in June to the influential American Israel Political Action Committee. During a fervently pro-Israel address in which he pledged unwavering support for the Jewish state, Obama said the US should not talk to Hamas until it renounced terrorism and recognized Israel.

Afterwards, a Hamas official, Sami Abu Zuhri, told Reuters that his group no longer had any preference in the US election. In the same vein as Chavez, Zuhri said: "Hamas does not differentiate between the two presidential candidates, Obama and McCain, because their policies regarding the Arab-Israel conflict are the same and are hostile to us, therefore we do have no preference and are not wishing for either of them to win."

This marked a change from earlier statements made by another Hamas official, Ahmed Yousef, who said Hamas liked Obama and compared him favorably to John Kennedy. The McCain camp was quick to make mischief by claiming that Hamas had "endorsed" Obama.

The Republicans also gleefully picked up on Fidel Castro's "endorsement" of Obama. In an article for the official Cuban paper, Granma, the old Cuban warhorse praised the Democrat as the "progressive candidate" in the US presidency.

Coming from a European social democrat, that would be considered either banal or a statement of the blindingly obvious, or indeed both. But coming from Castro it is politically delicate for Obama to say the least, not the kind of support he would wish to trumpet on his website ? Hey, Fidel likes me.

Less politically charged for Obama was this week's Guardian/ICM poll, showing that he is overwhelmingly Britain's choice to be the next US president, five times more popular than McCain. But then the Republicans can make political ammo of this by saying that wimpy Europeans like Obama.

Carried out ahead of Obama's visit to Britain next week as part of a foreign tour (Iraq and Afghanistan are on the itinerary), the poll showed that 53% feel certain he would make the best president, with only 11% favoring McCain; 36% declined to express an opinion. Obama might well wish that he enjoyed such a margin of support in the polls in the US, where he leads McCain by only 4%.

As for the McCain endorsement side of the story, the Republican campaign can trumpet that of Tran Tong Duyet, who was in charge of the notorious Hoa Lo prison, also known as the Hanoi Hilton, where McCain spent five-and-a-half years as an American prisoner of war.

"McCain is my friend," Duyet said recently. "If I was American, I would vote for him."

That is an endorsement surely worth trumpeting by the McCain camp before November.