According to Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez, the differences between John McCain and Barack Obama are minimal and that an Obama victory wouldn’t mean better relations between Venezuela and the country Chavez lovingly calls “the empire”.

Chavez told his supporters not to raise their hopes that relations with the United States would improve if Obama is elected U.S. president, saying there was little difference between him and Republican candidate John McCain.

“The two candidates for the U.S. presidency attack us equally, they attack us defending the interests of the empire,” Chavez said at a meeting of his socialist party.

“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.”

The Christian Science Monitor is more hopeful.

A McCain victory would allow him [Chavez] to sustain that message: Mr. McCain, after all, hails from the same party and shares many of the same policies as Bush. But Senator Obama is a different story…
“It’s hard seeing Chavez calling Obama ‘Satan’ and the likes,” says Ray Walser, a Latin America expert at the conservative Heritage Foundation. “He won’t get as much traction.”…”He would shift his tone probably away from personal attacks to questioning US policies and engagement in the hemisphere,” Walser says. But his real aim “is his idea of restructuring Latin America, to make it an independent force.”

While many people may not like the way Chavez delivers his message, but I have always taken his message as a criticism of policy in an “ahem, fiery” way.

Via / The Raw Story and the Latin Americanist