Steven Kull, director of the Program on International Policy Attitudes, which conducted the BBC poll, said that at a recent international conference he attended in Malaysia, many Muslims voiced astonishment at Mr. Obama’s rise because it was so much at odds with their assumptions about the United States. Remember that the one thing countless millions of people around the world "know" about the United States is that it is controlled by a cabal of white bankers and Jews who use police with fire hoses to repress blacks. To them, Mr. Obama’s rise triggers severe cognitive dissonance.
"It’s an anomaly, so contrary to their expectation that it makes them receptive to a new paradigm for the U.S.," Mr. Kull said.
That's from a Nicholas Kristof NY Times column entitled Rebranding the U.S. With Obama. Kristof recounts a conversation with a Chinese friend amazed by the idea the US would elect a black man. He refers to the words from Colin Powell's endorsement on Sunday on Meet the Press.
And then?
My opening blockquote explains in part the cognitive dissonance of my title. Clearly in many countries they might have to rethink ideas that are clearly warped.
We have heard many remarks - from the punditry, on editorial pages, from one another - about what electing Obama will symbolize about our country. Kristof points out how hard it would be for to imagine someone blackk leading France or Germany, or how the Luo tribe from which Obama's father derived is viewed negatively in East Africa. Tht might make us feel good about what we seem about to achieve in less than two weeks.
But maybe then we might recognize something ourselves, which is how far behind we are:
Yet before we get too far with the self-congratulations, it’s worth remembering something else.
In the western industrialized world, full of university graduates and marinated in principles of egalitarianism, the idea of electing a member of a racial minority to the highest office seems an astonishing breakthrough. But Jamaica’s 95 percent black population elected a white man as its prime minister in 1980, and kept him in office throughout that decade.
Likewise, the African nation of Mauritius has elected a white prime minister of French origin. And don’t forget that India is overwhelmingly Hindu but now has a Sikh prime minister and a white Christian as president of its ruling party, and until last year it had a Muslim in the largely ceremonial position of president.
We have been preparing for this for a while. We have had an Asian as a governor - Gary Locke of Washington. We have elected two Blacks as Governors - Doug Wilder and Deval Patrick. Obama is the third Black since the 17th Amendment elected to the US Senate, following Edwards Brooke of Massachusetts and Carol Moseley Braun of Illinois (whose seat he occupies after the intervening single term of Peter Fitzgerald). We have had Blacks elected in heavily white district - J. C. Watts in Oklahoma and Gary Franks in Massachusetts. And we have seen a white man not only win but get reelected in a majority black district, Steve Cohen of TN.
We MAY be moving towards a post-racial understanding of our politics. Certainly my students represent that in their own lives. The white students have no trouble with the idea of supporting Obama because of race any more than a few of the church-going Blacks see race as a barrier to supporting McCain on things like abortion policy or non-embryonic stem cells.
We have long recognized that we trail other nations in our willingness to elevate women to the highest office: compare us to Muslim countries like Pakistan, Indonesia and Bangladesh, and we should be embarrassed. Then there are tiny Domenica, the UK, Germany, Norway, Israel . . . We knew this, and it was part of the subtext of Hillary Clinton's foray into presidential politics.
I chose to write about Kristof's column because he does remind us of how we are lagging behind other nations in our willingness to elevate a minority to its highest office. It would probably serve us well to recognize that we are not the sole model of democracy, and that there are still things we can learn from other nations.
Kristof is blunt that Obama's skin color should not be a reason to vote for or against him, that substance should triumph over skins color. SHOULD however does not mean universality of the implied reality. Some who are Black are voting for Obama precisely because he is - that ethnic solidarity is understandable. And there are whites who will vote for Obama because they wish to make a statement about race, and about this country. Hopefully that is not the only reason, although I know that for some it will be, just as for some of the 39% who told the NBC - Wall Street Journal poll that they are voting for McCain as the lesser of two evils arrive at that point solely on the basis of race, even as they may seek other reasons to justify their actions, as purely racial motivations are no longer quite so acceptable in the more genteel parts of American society.
Kristof's final paragraph includes a clear reminder about our catching up with other nations:
Yet if this election goes as the polls suggest, we may find a path to restore America’s global influence — and thus to achieve some of our international objectives — in part because the world is concluding that Americans can, after all, see beyond a person’s epidermis. My hunch is that that is right, and that we’re every bit as open-minded about racial minorities as Jamaicans already were a quarter-century ago.
we’re every bit as open-minded about racial minorities as Jamaicans already were a quarter-century ago
In 1983 we had a president who began his presidential campaign in Neshoba County MS, giving an unambiguous if coded message clearly understood by many about race. I am not saying Reagan was a racist - I sincerely doubt he had a discriminatory bone in his body. But he was willing to allow racial innuendo and code words to be used on his half to achieve and retain political power. Looking at the campaign of a man who claims Reagan as one of his heroes, we see an unfortunate repetition of the willingness to use such tactics. We have not come as far as we might want, despite the model two and half decades ago of a smaller neighbor. Our pundits still obsess about race, about so-called Bradley effects.
We cannot ignore the historic nature of Obama's candidacy, just as we should not forget the historic nature of Clinton's. But I am not voting for Obama merely because he is black. I acknowledge that historic nature. I also argue that he is far more qualified and prepared to address the issues that confront this nation than is his opponent, something that has been clearly demonstrated by the campaigns each has run, and how both men have - or in the case of McCain have not - reacted to the financial crisis that so dominates our news and will shape the ability of the next Chief Executive to move this nation in a different direction than that past 8 years.
Obam DOES represent a rebranding of the image of the US. He is young, he is articulate, he is thoughtful, and - yes - he is black, with a father of Muslim heritage in Africa. But he is also white, with roots from his mother and her family that come from the heartland state of Kansas. Like an increasing portion of American families he combines lines that others might have thought disparate, contradictory. In my own family I have a nephew whose children are like Obama - half white, half black, proud of both heritages. And an America willing to to elect as its highest official someone of such background does provide a clear message that we are moving in a different direction.
It is about time that race - or gender - no longer serve as a barrier to serving in the highest office. We are almost half a century since demonstrating a willingness to move beyond one religious barrier with the election of JFK. We have not yet demonstrated a willingness to do what India has done, because after all Kennedy was still a Christian. We trail France, a country with a long history of anti-semitism, who had as a post- war Prime Minister the Jew Pierre Mendes-France.
We have a chance to catch up. And then to move on, beyond such distinctions. I long for the day when we will no longer be talking about the first Black president or the first Buddhist Congressman or the first Muslim Federal judge (we still have that before us, do we not?).
But in the meantime, I will be quite happy on November 5 when headlines around the world acknowledge that we have overcome one more barrier, and thereby redefined our image to the rest of the world.
In the twelve days left, I hope we all do all we can to make that forthcoming victory as massive a statement as possible, so that people around the world will say that Americans STRONGLY supported Obama as presidet.
Peace.