It pains me to report on this, but I feel it is important to capture the wide variety of reactions to an important moment in American history. Last week, Die Tageszeitung, a left-leaning German newspaper, ran the following headline when Barack Obama became the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee, that when translated into English, reads: “Uncle Barack's Cabin.” It has caused an […]
(United Evening News, Taipei, Taiwan) Continuing the theme of the global reaction to Obama's clinching the Democratic nomination for President, this time courtesy of Media Bistro. The US-focused media industry website collected front page covers from news dailies around the world. Click here for the full spread. PS: the front page covers were originally […]
When Senator Obama clinched the Democratic nomination last week, the BBC, by far the oldest and most global news network in the world, broadcast reactions to his feat from four areas of the world: China, Russia, India and Britain. In the segment about Chinese views on the election, the BBC's Beijing correspondent conceeds that most Chinese doesn't know […]
Next week my nephew Nathaniel graduates from High School. He was born the year I graduated from High School. But more momentous than the fact that I’m getting really old! is that he was the first member of my immediate family who wasn't born in Guyana, our “Caribbean” homeland at the tip of South America. […]
[kml_flashembed movie=”http://jp.youtube.com/v/JDiI0OMlpiE” width=”425″ height=”350″ wmode=”transparent” /] Kim Ghattas, the BBC's US correspondent, recently reported on global views of the presidential candidates, though before Obama's recent leap across the primary finish line. But the reporting is still relevant. Ghattas underscores that anticipation for a change in administration on the part of the global public has already caused attitudes toward the […]
Senator Obama's clinching the Democratic nomination for President made headlines not only in the US, but around the world. It's fair to say that in most parts of the world the reaction is overwhelmingly positive. But the world is a complicated place, so for the next couple of blog posts we’ll try to capture different reactions to […]
We have speculated before — along with many others — about Obama's impact on foreign attitudes toward the United States. But with the Democratic nomination now safely in his hands, this is no longer an academic question. As many foreigners as Americans seem to have celebrated the milestone that Obama's victory represents, encouraged by worldwide […]
Senator John McCain's major speech on May 15th , in which he outlined what he "would hope to have achieved at the end of my first term as President" in 2013, made international headlines. Most of the international news reports focused on McCain's vision of Iraq in 2013. For example, two weeks ago the Guardian […]
In the interest of improving America's image, someone should have banned coverage of Saturday's meeting of the Democrats’ Rules and Bylaws Committee in Washington. There were insults, snide remarks, grandstanding and pettifoggery during the six-hour meeting — and that was just the participants. The hundreds of partisan onlookers behaved much worse, yelling taunts and threats […]
The conservative-leaning London newsdaily the Daily Telegraph commissioned a poll on Europeans’ preferences for the next US president. The poll of 6,200 people in Britain, France, Germany, Italy and Russia, finds that, across all countries polled, Senator Obama received 52 percent of the popular vote, while Senator McCain received 15 percent. Senator Clinton was not included in the […]
In the "gotcha" spirit of our current politics, CNN is rudely replaying the archival footage of Scott McClellan dismissing Richard Clarke's tell-all book, written after Clarke left the Bush Administration in the wake of 9/11. "Why didn't he tell the President these things when he was in the White House, rather than waiting until he […]
This blog is dedicated to relating how the US Presidential candidates view the world and are viewed by it. Washington Post Editorial Page Editor and columnist Fried Hiatt penned compared the worlviews of Senators McCain and Obama by pulling back the curtains on the recent row over Obama's policy of taking with US enemies. In […]
Senator Obama's policy of negotiating with our enemies has come under fire recently from both Senator McCain as well as from Senator Clinton. Philip Fernando the former editor of a Sri Lankan paper, the Sunday Observer, weighs in on the issue in a piece published yesterday by the Asian Tribune. Here's an excerpt: “Obama has seized […]
Steven Barnes, Assistant Dean of Public Affairs at Princeton University's Woodrow Wilson School authored an op-ed for the International Herald Tribune yesterday. It discusses what is yet known of the three presidential candidates’ public diplomacy strategies. Here's a summary from Barnes’ piece. Senator Obama: In an interview with the San Fransisco Chronicle in February (listen to it […]
The forthcoming issue of The Atlantic contains a report on Senator Obama's foreign policy by Matthew Yglesias, the magazine's Associate Editor. The article begins: “Barack Obama has always been an independent thinker. He of course opposed the war in Iraq, and he's built a team of national-security advisers who disproportionately took the same, then-unpopular antiwar […]