Obama: A political earthquake abroad

As November 4 nears, one thing is certain: Senator Barack Obama has attracted the largest and most diverse majority in contemporary political history.

There is a chance this overwhelming triumph will be recorded in the United States. Where it’s already a fait accompli, however, is the rest of the world.

A vast barrage of straw polls is underway across the the globe, pitting Democrat Obama against Republican John McCain. The venues range from small rural districts to entire nations, conducted by local amateurs and by such nonpartisan public opinion giants as Gallup and the Pew Research Center.

The Economist (site here) , a widely respected English business weekly, has sponsored a worldwide “election,” with votes cast in every recognized state on Earth and the results tallied in an international “electoral college” modelled on America’s.

The foreign polls measure an unprecedented level of interest in the actual U.S. election Tuesday. They also confirm an astounding level of overseas support – exceeding 70 percent in most nations – invested in Barack Obama, crossing all lines of race, ethnicity, history, religion and ideology.

6-1 MARGIN WORLDWIDE

The Economist survey is the most carefully constructed of these psuedo-elections, with 197 states participating, and thanks to its sample group, one of the most telling.

Only subscribers are allowed to vote. Given the typical profile of Economist readers, this means an electorate of the heaviest hitters in international business, politics and academia.

Two decades ago, it would have been a natural offshore constituency for the Republican Party. The Economist itself endorsed Bob Dole over Bill Clinton in 1996, and George W. Bush over Al Gore four years later, as well as supporting Bush’s war in Iraq and his deregulating economic policies.

At this writing, Obama has a 6-1 lead over McCain in the publication’s popular election – and a mind-boggling 9,120 votes in its 9,870-seat electoral college. With only 5 percent of these seats yet to be filled, McCain’s total stands at 270.

This isn’t simply a landslide. It’s a full-scale earthquake.

Its individual tremors are as stunning as their cumulative total. America’s principal European NATO allies – including the United Kingdom, Germany, France, the Netherlands and Italy – all gave Obama at least 90 percent of their popular support. Europe as a whole awarded the Illinois senator 1,268 electoral votes to McCain’s 5.

Serbia and Kosovo, bitterly opposed on nearly every other issue, both prefer Obama by margins of at least 8 to 1. China and Taiwan both came in at 82 percent for Obama, Pakistan and India at between 81 and 87 percent.

It may be unremarkable, given the rage in the Muslim world at U.S. foreign policy under the Bush Administration, that Arab voters favour Obama by an average of 8 to 1. But Israelis also chose Obama by an enormous gulf in The Economist poll, 71 percent to McCain’s 29 percent, despite ominous predictions by McCain that the Democrats will abandon them.

VoteforPresident.com, another international online pollster (site here) , found 87 percent support for Obama worldwide.

The late October results follow earlier polls, most notably a Pew Research Center survey in 24 nations last spring, that placed Obama ahead of all other candidates, Democrat and Republican alike, even before the party’s nominees were chosen.

The small Tuscan town of Bibbona, near Livorno, was the scene last week of its own mock U.S. presidential election, as detailed in il Tirreno, the regional daily newspaper. Obama’s 94 percent victory out of 750 ballots cast – in a multi-party country where candidates seldom win more than 25 percent – was “stra’grande” Tirreno marvelled, which roughly translates as “unimaginably big.”

The next day, a national political rally in Rome drew an estimated 2 million marchers from every province in Italy. The purpose was to demand changes in economic policy from the current Italian government. To the organizers’ surprise, the immense crowd broke into a spontaneous chant of “Obama! Obama!”

AN EMBLEMATIC FIGURE

It doesn’t require scientific polling to determine why Obama appeals so viscerally overseas. Put simply, the answer lies in the globalization of problems and anxieties, as well as manufacturing and trade. That point is underscored in every cursory reading of foreign newspapers, and in nearly every casual conversation in foreign streets.

Pick virtually any concern that weighs on U.S. voters today, and you’ll also have identified a source of uncertainty in the rest of the world. Once upon a time, the tensions unleashed by multi-racial society, by growing discrepancies in income between rich and poor, or between generations, cultures and religions, were thought to be almost strictly American.

They aren’t anymore.

On a floodtide of refugees, legal and undocumented immigrants, the foreign-born populations of Paris, Rotterdam, Berlin, London – and increasingly Moscow and Milan – are now at least as large proportionately as those in New York, San Francisco and Los Angeles. Racial and cultural misunderstandings, punctuated by violence, have become an uncomfortable norm abroad, not only in large European cities, but across much of South and Southeast Asia, and in wealthy Middle Eastern nations like Saudi Arabia and the Gulf Emirates where a huge imported workforce resides.

Every continent has been touched by the deadly confrontation between militant Islam and its perceived enemies, with China, Russia and India no less desperate for solutions than the United States and Europe.

Immense global capital flows and high-velocity technology advances in the developed countries – along with chronic civil conflict in the Third World – have broadened the gap in wealth and expectations between the North and South with each passing year.

Terrorism. Fanaticism. Loss of faith in public institutions. Entrenched cynicism about politicians and the media. The list goes on and on, and its details are repeated in every language.

What distinguishes the United States, in this moment of universal bewilderment and fear, is that no one else has a Barack Obama.

Symbolism counts for a great deal in politics. It imparts a crucial tone to the conduct of government. And far more than policy alone, symbolism has the power to unite people in common endeavour or divide them into warring tribes.

Apart from anything else that might be said of it, the candidacy of Obama carries phenomenal symbolic power.

The world at large knows that Barack Obama was born to a white American mother and black Kenyan father, and raised party in Muslim Indonesia and largely in the quietly Protestant household of his grandparents. It knows that he has personal, up-close experience in the slums of Jakarta and the Chicago ghetto – and also at the heady summits of the Harvard Law Review and the United States Senate.

To a stunning degree, Obama literally embodies the reconciliation of opposites that trouble the entire planet in 2008.

“This is why the Obama campaign has stirred such global passion,” New York Times columnist Roger Cohen — himself a naturalized American with British and South African roots – wrote in the final week of the campaign. “He is an emblematic figure of the border-hopping 21st century.”

Hundreds of major foreign newspapers, from Sao Paolo to Singapore, have been featuring daily updates on the progress of the U.S. presidential campaign for months. Le Monde, France’s leading daily, posted no fewer than 27 U.S. election articles on its online site between October 28 and 30 – while Milan’s Corriere della Sera published 25 in the single edition of October 29.

A Gallup poll found that 66 percent of Japanese hope Obama will be the next U.S. president, a startling 51-point lead over McCain. “From the surface and at a policy-level, Obama is everything Russians stereotypically shouldn’t like. But the Russians in our poll love him,” writes political analyst Yuri Mamchur, alluding to a Moscow roundtable survey in which all 50 participants said they supported Obama.

He is leading the Economist poll, by exactly the same point spread, among voters in Colombia and its arch-enemy Venezuela, respectively Washington’s closest ally and most uncompromising foe in South America. He has been publicly endorsed by both Cuba’s Fidel Castro, the last living hero of unreconstructed Communism, and by Boris Johnson, the conservative Tory mayor of London.

“Obama visibly incarnates change and hope,” Johnson declared.

Frank Viviano – barganews staff reporter – World View CBS5