Given the reaction worldwide, one could be forgiven the impression that Barack Obama was elected president last week to save not only the United States but the entire world.
For my part, I can’t help wondering why American news organizations are reporting this admittedly unprecedented reaction as, well, “news”. After all, here’s how I telegraphed it in a commentary eight months ago:
I’ve been doing quite a lot of business travel lately… But I was surprised to find that the only thing anybody wanted to talk about was the US presidential campaign. And this, despite my best efforts to get Britons to talk about the Diana inquest or the political travails of PM Gordon Brown; and similar efforts to get Africans to talk about the tribal warfare still raging in Kenya or the criminal travails of ANC leader Jacob Zuma in South Africa.
[The Kennedys: dissing Hillary, endorsing Barack … ignoring Bush, Caribbean Net News, February 1, 2008]
Therefore, I am not at all surprised by reports in recent days about Americans abroad “feeling proud to be Americans again” because people in so many foreign countries have suddenly fallen in love with America again. And there seems no doubt that foreigners now love America for the same reason that Americans are now proud of America: Barack Obama and the great expectations for change he not only represents but also personifies.
What is most interesting and encouraging in this regard, however, is that foreign leaders are expressing this hopeful sentiment with as much giddiness and political idealism as their star-struck citizens. Ironically, no country has shown more national love for America since Obama’s election than France – a country notorious for its visceral anti-Americanism.
In fact, the French wasted little time codifying their new-found affection for Obama’s America by publishing a manifesto entitled “Yes, we can!” – in which leaders from every facet of French society pledged “to stamp out racism and shake up a white political and social elite that smacks of colonial times.” Here, in part, is what their manifesto states:
We shouldn’t be surprised that Obama’s popularity is so high here: It testifies to the aspirations of all the children of France who are experiencing by proxy a recognition that France does not give them. It also betrays the bad faith of those who welcome the victory of modernity outside our borders, in order to tolerate the status quo here…
The election of Barack Obama highlights via a cruel contrast the shortcomings of the French Republic, and the distance that separates us from a country whose citizens knew how to go beyond the racial question and elect a man who happens to be black as president…
What a lesson! We French … should listen to it well.
(Note: France has 555 members in its “House of Representatives”; but only one is black.)
Meanwhile, the leading voice for this cause célèbre is not that of some left-wing intellectual. Instead, it belongs to the wife of the right-wing president of France, First Lady Carla Bruni-Sarkozy who said that Obama’s election brought her “an immense joy.”
More to the point, she noted that “Our prejudices are insidious” and expressed hope that “the Obama effect would reshape French society.”
Clearly, if Obama can win over the French so easily, he should have the Russians, Iranians and perhaps even al-Qaeda eating out of the palm of his hand in no time. Well, that is the “audacity of hope,” isn’t it…?
Hail Obama!
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Sample of reaction worldwide
Leopold JAMES says
We are proud to have initiated an I-Petition endorsing Senator Barack OBAMA as new president of the USA and leader of the ‘Free’ World.
May God bless and protect this Messenger of hope and of positice change.