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June 15, 2008
The people at North Coast Voices learn all sorts of odd things about the Obama campaign. ClarenceGirl's cat even signed up for the Obama email newsletter.
This piece from Clarrie Rivers follows up a story the Sydney Morning Herald borrowed from the London Telegraph on a bit of the Pew Institute's research.
Bit of a detour here, but in a globalised world it seems logical to start doing global opinion polls. The original Pew project was supposed to research the Russian and European public's response to developments since the end of the Cold War. On 10 September 2001 the organisers, including Madeleine Albright, sat around a big table in New York and finalised the plans for the study. Of course, the next day was 9/11, which changed everything. They ended up surveying global opinion to try and answer the Why do they hate us? question. That research ended up in book form about the time Americans began to understand that it wasn't just Middle Easterners and French toffs who found their foreign policies objectionable.
The new Pew poll finds that a lot of the world understands that the American economy has an impact on their own, and some of the world takes a more favourable view of the United States with the impending end of the Bush presidency. Whether this is a good thing for Obama or not is debatable, but:
People around the world who have been paying attention to the American election express more confidence in Barack Obama than in John McCain to do the right thing regarding world affairs. McCain is rated lower than Obama in every country surveyed, except for the United States where his rating matches Obama's, as well as in Jordan and Pakistan where few people have confidence in either candidate.
Recall the horror that reverberated around the globe at the results of the last presidential election? From memory it was a British newspaper which published the headline "How could (insert very big number) Americans be so dumb?"
I wonder whether the Democrats nomination outcome would have been the same if the rest of the world had had a say?
It's interesting to ponder what the world would look like if countries directly affected by the United States had some say in who they'd like making decisions like whether to invade them, bomb them, 'negotiate' FTAs with them, 'share' intelligence and so on. What if each nation had a delegate? Clearly the rest of the world is of the opinion that their chances would be better with Obama than McCain. 80% of Australians are.
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Since America is the big elephant in the room that other governments are constantly trying to work out where the elephant will sit next, there is always a bit of concern from the rest of the world what the next US President will be like. Personally I think the two candidates, even when restrained by domestic political concerns, are better international presidents than Bush. Obama is far the better in this area though. After the last eight years I think the world is hoping for a good, calming, international American president.