Bono, the lead singer of U2 and one of the most influential people outside an official office in the world, wrote an Opinion piece for this weekend's New York Times that says essentially this: America is a great nation that the rest of the world needs for inspiration and hope, and Barack Obama is capable of not only providing that inspiration and hope, but of making peace, prosperity and environmental renewal a reality -- If he can lay down a clear plan for achieving it.

Bono lauds Obama's support for the Millennium Development Goals. The MDGs are a plan written by the United Nations that include everything from improving child and maternal health to environmental sustainability and halting the spread of HIV/AIDS. In 2000 the United Nations Millennium Declaration committed every country to reducing extreme poverty with a series of specific deadlines and goals. In his speech at the United Nations last month, Obama pledged to support the goals, and to "approach next year's summit with a global plan to make them a reality." Then he went a step further, suggesting that we should "set our sights on the eradication of extreme poverty in our time."

Got that? Not cut it in half, but eradicate it altogether.

Poverty, as Bono points out, is one of three volatile elements that together comprise a recipe for global disaster, the others being ideology and climate. An antidote to that probability is an equation suggested by General James Jones, national security advisor to the president: Stability = security + development.

Fulfilling the Millennium Development Goals, along with Obama's other objectives, is, as Bono says, no small task. But with his global popularity, the president is in a unique position to move American and the world forward. The Nobel Peace Prize that Obama will accept in Oslo this December could well be the message from the world that Bono suggests it is: "Don't blow it."

[Image: atU2.com]