"Tony Abbott's ALP criticism could affect US links."
Tony Abbott's use of a Washington Post interview to brand his Labor predecessors as ''wacko'' and ''embarrassing'' could set back his working relationship with the Obama adminstration, a leading US commentator says.
Norman Ornstein, an author and political scientist with the right-leaning American Enterprise Institute, said he ''winced'' when he read the interview in which Mr Abbott put the boot into the Rudd-Gillard government in unusually strong language for a foreign interview.
''It really does violate a basic principle of diplomacy to drag in your domestic politics when you go abroad,'' Dr Ornstein said. ''It certainly can't help in building a bond of any sort with President Obama to rip into a party, government and - at least implicitly - leader, with whom Obama has worked so closely.
''Perhaps you can chalk it up to a rookie mistake. But it is a pretty big one.'' Politicians around the world typically refrain from engaging in fierce domestic political argument when they are speaking to an overseas audience.
