Here’s a first conversational stab at the point that Obama vs. McCain — while it’s not the world’s election — is a world event like no US presidential campaign before it. This is partly the Web effect, which puts millions, maybe billions, of people in the churn of daily information about the campaign. And it’s even moreso the resonance of Barack Obama, who’s been dubbed “Germany’s favorite politician at the moment” (in Germany) and “definitively… the candidate of Europe” (in Portugal), as Shmuel Rosner of Ha’aretz wrote in Slate this Spring.
It’s different and remarkable, furthermore, as the young editor of openUSA, Kanishk Tharoor, remarks in our conversation, that interest abroad in US politics seems based less on calculations of US foreign policy toward nations and continents like China, say, or Africa or the Middle East. The fascination seems rather with “underlying issues like race, like generation, like globalism.” And the provocative effect of the fascination shows up, for example, in a piece written for openUSA from India that asks: “Can there be a Muslim Obama?” Or as Anthony Barnett of openDemocracy puts it in this conversation from London, Obama “unlocks possibility. He unlocks the imagination. If he could do that, what could I do? What could we do?”
