If there was ever a period that so ably demonstrated the febrile nature of politics it has been the past week or two. As Jacob Zuma strode into Downing Street after having met with the British prime minister, looking surprisingly at ease in the media glare, Thabo Mbeki was quietly meeting King Mswati III which, with all due respect to the Swazi monarch, pretty much sums up the state of play: Zuma on the ascendant, Mbeki on the slide.
Democrats Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama assailed potential White House opponent John McCain on the economy on Tuesday, accusing the Republican of favoring the wealthy and turning his back on struggling workers and middle-class families.
Dale Steyn used to be a well-scrubbed bloke who wore a goofy grin that wobbled harmlessly under starry, starry eyes. He was polite and cheerful, and he could bowl a bit. He probably never said ”Well, golly gee.” But if he did, we would have chuckled heartily and ruffled his hair as if the lot of us were in a Spur commercial.
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/ 15 January 2008
There is more than a touch of Ronald Reagan — or even, dare one say it, George W Bush — in Jacob Zuma. Apparently happily unencumbered by the need to demonstrate a towering intellectual faculty, he is an archetypal instinctive politician — streetwise, savvy and not to be underestimated.
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/ 14 September 2007
Who is George Bush? A gaffe-ridden buffoon? The man who confronts the evildoers? Or is he Bush as Bush sees himself, the decider, a leader who makes the hard choices and sticks to them? In just 16 months’ time, the job of working out who Bush really is will move out of the world’s newsrooms and into the book-lined studies of historians.
Why have not very many people heard of Nanda Soobben? Niren Tolsi reports.