Eyes of World on American Election

I was privileged to spend most of the first 15 years of my life growing up in the Philippines. My view of the United States was formed through a lens looking back at the white picket fences of my country, as opposed to having those white picket fences serve as blinders to keep the rest of the world at bay. I came to understand the difference between the love other peoples of the world have for Americans and the American Dream...and the disdain they hold for the often provincial and myopic political leadership that wars against that very American Dream, as well as the best interests of all nations.

Lisa Van Dusen has penned a column this morning that brings to life the importance of Barack Obama, and his campaign, to all of us who inhabit this tiny planet at this critical juncture in history. It is a column of wisdom that reflects the perspective of the world I came to know as a child looking out over the South China Sea.

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Eyes of World on American Election

by Lisa Van Dusen, Sun Media

One thing about U.S. presidential campaigns that doesn't apply anywhere else on the same scale is that when America picks a president, the whole world is watching.

If there was any doubt elsewhere that progress has a life of its own in America, 45 years after Martin Luther King's "I Have a Dream" speech and 40 years after Bobby Kennedy predicted it could happen within 40 years, the first black candidate claimed the mantle of presidential nominee of a major party.

When Barack Obama accepted the Democratic Party's nomination Friday night, it meant something not just to African Americans and to all Americans, but to people watching around the world, many of whom doubted that it could actually happen.

For all the hits Obama took this summer from the Republicans for his international popularity, it was no accident that 200,000 people came out to hear him speak in Berlin in July, and it's no accident that he's equally popular elsewhere, including Canada.

It isn't, as the attack-ad mongers would have you think, because foreigners are foreign and so is he. Obama's race didn't matter to those people who stood in Berlin that day; Germans have their own historic traumas to heal. But they know his race does matter to some Americans, and that if he becomes the next president of the United States anyway it will be in part because enough of those voters overcame the very fears of change, of the unknown and of the "other" that his international popularity has been used to stoke.

It may be that Obama is popular elsewhere not just because, in Canada for instance, we tend to favour Democratic presidents but because an Obama victory would somehow represent the end of that era of post-9/11 insularity and fear that, projected as Bush foreign policy, became neurotically anti-diplomatic and objectifying to the countries in its crosshairs.

Because of the way he talks about America's role in the world and maybe because outsiders suspect that, as an African-American, he has a more nuanced relationship with power than previous presidents, foreigners see in Obama a potential dialing down of the big-stick Bush overkill of the last eight years.

As so many polls have shown in the years since the invasion of Iraq, foreigners still make the distinction between America and its leadership.

People still see and love those things about America that have lured, for more than a century, so many who know that to take your chances on an American experience you have to actually drink the water and for them, Obama represents more than the sum of his parts even as a symbol of racial reconciliation.

There may be a sense that if enough Americans can overcome that downright un-American reflex to stick with the safe and the inward, especially after the kind of shock that would understandably make you wary of the unknown, then there may be light at the end of the post-9/11 tunnel.

Even before Obama's speech Friday night, the rest of the world got hints from Denver that this election process might hold something close to the promise of a new normal.

SOMETHING LARGER

When Hillary and then Bill Clinton overcame the campaign baggage of seeing their own dream slip away to unify the party by endorsing Obama, it not only reminded Democrats that something larger is at stake, it reminded the world that there was a president before the last eight years who knew something about how to communicate in a way worthy of a great power, that there could be another one and that that unfortunate interlude was more about a man than about a country.

If Obama loses on merit; if his campaign somehow derails on the ground at this late stage or if Republican running mate Sarah Palin succeeds in rustling those die-hard Hillary voters to greener pastures on the rebound or he makes the sort of huge, unforeseeable gaffe that can't but disqualify him, then the rest of the world will turn the page.

But if he were to lose because not enough voters were ready to remember that witnessing history isn't always a bad thing, the reaction elsewhere may be regret over a reunion sadly postponed with an America that people would rather not stop waiting for.