IF all world citizens could have cast votes in last November's election, Barack Obama would've won a landslide. Worldwide Gallup polls in late October 2008 showed the Democrat triumphing in all but six countries.
His vote margins ranged from an 86 point lead in Kenya to a narrow loss of 8 points in Latvia. But it was generally well above 40 points: 60 points in France, 64 points in Holland, etc.
So what does the world think of its candidate after three foreign trips and his first 100 days in office? In short, he's still a rock star. In three months, Obama and his wife have upstaged France's Sarkozys, befriended Queen Elizabeth II, shaken hands with Venezuela's Hugo Chavez and proposed reconciliation to the Kremlin. One foreign minister at the Strasbourg NATO summit admitted frankly: "We all want to be photographed with him." Obama was cheered from Prague to Istanbul.
Many factors explain this popularity, including that he's not George W. Bush. But the main explanation remains that many foreigners, like most Americans, relish the adventure of the black son of a single mother who grew up to become president. That his father was a Kenyan, that he grew up in Indonesia, that he opposed the Iraq War -- all add to his luster in the European, African, Asian and Latin-American popular imaginations. Even so, it's his status as America's first black president that makes him a world-historical hero.
This adulation doesn't necessarily extend to his policies. Left-wing Czechs cheered his Prague speech calling for a nuclear-weapon-free world. But they were upset when he endorsed Bush's plans for an anti-missile defense system in the Czech Republic. It didn't fit their view of him as a new, idealistic kind of statesman. It wasn't utopian enough.
Governments don't much like utopianism. Their game is national interest. They're happy to hear a little idealistic rhetoric from Obama. But they won't pay for it with anything substantial.
Thus, Western European governments were delighted when Obama apologized for US arrogance, signed onto Kyoto climate-change regulations and hinted at prosecuting Bush lawyers for legal opinions that allowed "waterboarding."
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