The conventional wisdom has it that this month's eruption of violence between Russia and Georgia played squarely into the hands of John McCain. With pundits and hacks fulminating about a return to the Cold War, McCain has ratcheted up the rhetoric, supposedly sending a muscular to the Kremlin. He demanded that "Russia should immediately and unconditionally cease its military operations and withdraw all forces from sovereign Georgian territory." McCain, who has in the past called Vladimir Putin a "totalitarian dictator", went on to belittle the more cautious tone struck by the Obama campaign as "bizarrely in sync with Moscow." Such claims amount to preposterous misrepresentations of Obama's position and are calculated to appeal to the cruder, blustering passions of the American people. It's not just the benighted of the developing world, after all, that seek solace in their strongmen.

In the heat of the summer, the presidential race seems to have lost its fire. The contest between McCain and Obama had promised to be a clash of starkly different histories and personalities, and - thanks to both candidates' commitment to bipartisanship and dialogue - had even promised to be about something, about lofty visions as well as the detail of meatier policy issues. Obama claimed to have ushered in a "new politics", a claim bolstered by the resilience and high-mindedness with which he overcame the rancorous Hillary Clinton. These pretensions look threadbare amid an increasingly dreary squabble.

There is little "new" - in that sweeping sense that the word gains when associated with Obama - to be found in the war of impressions that has occupied the US media in recent weeks. Obama's successful trip to Europe won him a good deal of glowing press coverage. In response, the McCain camp has attacked the Democrat's "celebrity" (video below), linking Obama to Britney Spears and Paris Hilton.

The ad follows in the vein of McCain's strategy of striking principally at Obama's character, suggesting either a deficit of Americanness, experience, or substance, or all three. Note especially in this ad how McCain himself barely appears. The McCain camp have realised that there is little they can do to tear the limelight away from Obama. Thus the ad seeks to turn the international enthusiasm for Obama into pubescent sychophancy. By this reasoning, it's acceptable that McCain will never draw the crowds that Obama does, because those crowds represent drooling fandom, not meaningful political judgement.

The Obama camp has hit back with an ad of its own, arguing that McCain has taken the "low road" in his attacks, and repeatedly lumping McCain with the "old policies" and "old politics" of the Bush years. Obama does stroll through much of this ad (one of his crowning strengths, after all, is his presentability). But there is something quite dispiriting in its insistence on pushing buttons, on linking Bush to McCain (a strategy this blog has always been wary of since there is much to suggest that McCain would make a very different president), on the below the belt repetition of "old".

At a tactical level, of course, this is totally kosher campaign "politics". For us optimists, however, who were ready for something - is it alright to hope? - different, the much-vaunted "new politics" are nowhere in sight, sacrificed for "the brain-dead, instant-rebuttal paradigm of modern democratic politics", as Clive Crook at the Financial Times puts it. To be fair, such "difference" is more incumbent upon Obama than McCain. At the moment, Obama has yet to live up to his golden promises.

In April, the IHT/NYT columnist Roger Cohen gauged the public opinion of Asia in sweeping, clumsy strokes. While "Europe votes Democrat", he argued, "Asia tends Republican". Supposedly, Asians see the world more in terms of "classic balance-of-power equations, driven by the might and self-interest of nations, than through the post-sovereign European prism of international institution-building and soft power." According to Cohen, Asians would view a Democratic administration under Barack Obama with a good deal of uncertainty and very little optimism.

Enter the Asia Society, an institution with at least a bit more Asia-savvy than Cohen. In a poll conducted of Asian leaders and intellectuals, Barack Obama comfortably outstripped McCain for reasons as easily understood in Europe as in Asia. As the Indian newspaper editor and writer MJ Akbar said, "Obama represents the American dream, the future... and it would be a sad day indeed were Americans to choose the past over the future." Predictably, Indonesian thinkers saw great merit in how Obama would remake the image of America in the eyes of the Muslim world, in part because Obama first learned of tolerance and diversity in Indonesia. Japanese foreign policy expert Kunihiko Miyake believed that Obama represents "a change in the way America sees itself... and I think it's a positive thing and many Japanese agree with me." Filipina scholar Carolina Hernandez highlighted Obama's charismatic appeal to Asia's millions of young, internet-savvy America observers. Even the supposedly Republican-friendly Indian IT industry is "rooting for Obama".

To understand "Asia" is not to reduce the continent and its people to the motivations of its states. Cohen - and watery pundits of his ilk - are all too eager to build their columns from empty paradigms. In this case, Asia is "statist" while Europe is "post-statist". Chinese and Indian foreign ministers may trumpet national sovereignty while European leaders press for integration. But do their statements necessarily reflect greater public opinion? The collapse of the Lisbon Treaty in Ireland suggests otherwise.

Cohen often writes with subtlety about Europe. He should have the grace and the sense to extend the same sophistication to Asia.

Accepted wisdom has it that Barack Obama's race and mixed background will help repair the image of America abroad. This is supposed to be particularly true in west Asia. As Yasser Khalil wrote in the Christian Science Monitor recently, Obama's Muslim heritage and promised diplomatic approach to the region could herald a new dawn in the US' relations with the Arab and Muslim world.

Nouri Luhemiya on The Moor Next Door blog offers an altogether darker suggestion. Critiquing the way Obama's international appeal has been represented, Nouri writes:

The reporter, like many, focuses on Obama’s blackness as an asset outside of the United States. It is not quite PC to ask whether or not it would be a hindrance. My view is that, when one gets to a certain level of power, his color does not matter whatsoever. He will be treated with respect by heads of state, though there may be some gaffes on the part of European or Asian leaders.

It is interesting, though, to ask, just for asking’s sake, whether or not Turks, Syrians, Egyptians, or other peoples in the Muslim world would elect someone like Barack Obama. My guess is that they would not. (The status of blacks in Middle Eastern countries, in everyday life and even folk traditions lead me to this conclusion.) This also makes me skeptical as to the extent to which Obama’s “face” could dissuade people in the region from becoming or remaining anti-American. There is an exceptional amount of severe contempt that many Levantines hold for black people (and other dark skinned people), that many Westerners, especially Americans, entirely miss. I do not know for sure where it comes from on the whole. Part of it is surely the identification of blackness with social and racial inferiority, the result of the fact that blacks and most dark-skinned Arabs have slave ancestry (Arabs have very little sympathy for the descendants of slaves, especially from what African-Americans who have been to the Gulf have told me, and my own understanding of the way that most Arabs view black people). Being black is not as much an asset in the Muslim world as it is in American white liberal circles.

It is hard to believe that the ascension of a non-white leader to the Oval Office would not change in small part the way much of the world, including west Asia, sees the US. Surely even the most bigoted Levantine would register the momentous nature of an Obama presidency. Nevertheless, Nouri is right in his general scepticism. America observers are not simpletons; a charismatic "change in face" is no substitute for the much more arduous and subtle change in policy.

With the general election before us, the presidential campaign has at last shifted to the contest most of us have been relishing. John McCain vs. Barack Obama seems a battle of stark contrast: age against youth, experience against brash confidence, the "Great American Century" against 21st century global pluralism. Both project vastly different images of leadership and, consequently, seem to offer equally different options for America.

But what makes both candidates so compelling - particularly in comparison to their predecessors - is that neither are really products of their respective party establishments. As Anne Applebaum points out in the Daily Telegraph, Hillary Clinton and Mike Huckabee won the support of the "bases" of the Democrat and Republican parties - "blue-collar" whites in the blue corner and conservatives in the red corner. Applebaum suggests that McCain and Obama appeal principally to "unpredictable centrists" and represent an unprecedented a-partisan shift in American politics.

Yet the candidates didn't simply navigate away from their party's "bases" into fresh, politically uncharted territory. The earth has moved beneath the parties' feet. Obama and McCain were wise to spot this change, but it is a transformation they have noticed, not made.

Hillary Clinton's substantial victory over Obama in Puerto Rico yesterday has encouraged her campaign to keep clutching at straws. Terry McAuliffe, the campaign chair, argued that the result revealed a demographic failure on Obama's part: “It was a 100 percent Hispanic primary and it shows that he has a problem with the Latino community. He cannot close in this key core constituency.”

This is most certainly the wrong conclusion to draw. Turn out in Puerto Rico was staggeringly low, at a puny 16%. More importantly, the politics of the island territory are far removed from that of the United States proper. As one Puerto Rican put it,

"We are a colony. We do not participate in any of the US political processes, really. There isn't a general understanding of US national politics, nor of the "Republican" v. "Democrat" mentality. We are consumed by our local politics and whether we should become a state, an independent country or remain as we are."

It is also misguided to look for a barometer of general "Latino opinion" in the Puerto Rican vote. Issues like immigration policy - often important among Hispanic voters - have no resonance in Puerto Rico. The shared language of Spanish doesn't politically unite the island's inhabitants to Mexicans in San Diego or Dominicans in the Bronx. To assume as much is patronising, and perhaps even inflammatory.

It is hardly innocent to claim that Latinos won't vote for a black candidate. MacAuliffe's suggestion that Obama fails amongst Hispanic voters indelicately probes the supposed "black-brown divide", one of those mythical beasts of American politics. Though debunked by scholars, the stereotype of Latino-African American antipathy retains a crude power that should not be underestimated. Nor should it be appealed to by mainstream politicians.