Realising his campaign vow to "shut down the tax havens" will be on US President Barack Obama's back burner for the foreseeable future, according to CNN political pundit Roland Martin.

Mr. Martin, the guest speaker at the Bermuda International Business Association annual general meeting lunch at the Fairmont Hamilton Princess yesterday, also suggested that the phrase was simply designed to glean support in the campaign and would not necessarily translate into action, now Mr. Obama was in the White House.

In an interview with The Royal Gazette, Mr. Martin also spoke about the emotions that caused him to shed tears in front of tens of millions of viewers on CNN's election night broadcast, moments after the network had called the presidential victory for Mr. Obama.

A self-proclaimed Obama supporter, Mr. Martin's role on CNN is to represent the liberal point of view in political discussion.

Having covered Mr. Obama since he ran for the US Senate, Chicago-based Mr. Martin has heard the new President's rhetoric on tax havens several times.

"That's not even remotely a priority right now for the administration," Mr. Martin said. "The whole focus is dealing with the US economy."

President Obama, when he was in the US Senate, co-sponsored with Sen. Carl Levin the Stop Tax Havens Abuse bill, which names Bermuda on its list of tax havens.

The call to close down tax havens was a "standard campaign ploy", adopted previously by many other candidates, he added.

"There are three phases to the presidency," Mr. Martin said. "The primaries, which is hyper-partisan and is all about appealing to the hard core of the party. When you win the primary, then you move toward the centre because you're speaking to the broader US voting public. Phase three is the reality of governing when it's very difficult to make all those proposals reality.

"The then Senator Obama said in the campaign he was going to repeal the Bush tax cuts and tax the windfall profits of the oil companies. There was huge applause whenever he said those things. Now he's in power he's said that the Bush tax cuts will be allowed to expire in 2010."

However, he said the new government was determined to crack down on tax law abusers, just as the Bush administration had done. President Obama's vision of a more bipartisan legislative process took an early knock last week when the economic stimulus bill passed in the House of representatives — but without the support of a single Republican.

"Obama will soon learn that the only person in Washington thinking about bipartisanship is him," Mr. Martin said.

"He wants to talk to both sides, get their points of view and incorporate the best ideas from both sides.

"The reality is that no Republican wants to play the bipartisan game when they are thinking about (the mid-term elections in) 2010. For example, if the stimulus bill was 70 percent tax cuts, the Republicans would demand 90 percent. And if it was 90 percent, they would want 100 percent."

Mr. Martin reflected on his emotions on election night and what had caused him to weep when the realisation came that America had elected its first African-American president.

"I was thinking about a lot of things," Mr. Martin recalled. "About all of the black soldiers who came home from the war and were lynched in their uniforms. About all the African-Americans who had masters degrees or PhDs, but who, because of Jim Crow (the name given to US laws that enforced segregation between the late 19th century and the 1960s), they ended up working in menial jobs and they could not do what they wanted to do.

"About all those black kids crammed into a single-room school trying to claw an education. The tears began to flow. The others in the studio could see what was happening, but I didn't want to say anything, because I didn't want anything to interrupt that moment.

"I was thinking of all those years when black parents had been telling a lie to their children when they told them they could be anything they wanted to be. They always knew there was one job you could not have and that was President. Now no black parent has to lie to their children again."

Mr. Martin had breakfast with the eight winners of the first BIBA AGM Essay Competition. One of the themes he noted was that Obama's election would have a positive impact on the Island's youth. "Here is a country where you already have a Premier who looks like Obama," Mr. Martin said. "They said they think differently about the US.

"I urged them not to think of Bermuda as a small island country and the US as the big, bad, wonderful land to aspire to, but to regard Bermuda as equally important as the US. Take pride in what you have."