The World Has a Crush on Obama

The first time I ever laid eyes on Barack Obama, I was sitting on a friend's couch in New York watching the 2004 Democratic National Convention. I was fresh from a several-month stint abroad and happy to be home.

At the time, two years into the Iraq war, with most of the world up in arms over U.S. foreign policy, suspicious of American intentions, and disgusted with Los Bush (the Bushes, collectively, as some of my foreign friends referred to them), being an American abroad was not exactly the pleasant experience it had once been. Where once I had gotten thumbs up and welcoming nods I now noted narrower eyes and distinctly colder shoulders when it was finally understood that I was an American.

Back at home finally, I was focused on the convention, hoping John Kerry would win the election and do something to slow the velocity of our country hurtling in what the world and most Americans had already begun to believe was the wrong direction. Then Barack Obama walked onto the stage. He was physically elegant--trim, well-groomed, graceful, young--and when he opened his mouth and uttered the first few words of that now famous keynote speech, all I could do was stare. I had never heard a black man, or any man, speak so passionately, so smartly, so well.  Not in this country. Instantly, irrevocably, I had a crush on Barack Obama.

Over the next four years I watched my crush spread, from the electrified convention crowd in Boston, to Illinois, where he won his U.S. Senate seat, into the Senate where he charmed even the most archconservative Republicans across the aisle and teamed with them on key bipartisan legislation. On through his presidential campaign, packing thirty-, fifty-, seventy thousand hysterical fans into auditoriums and public forums all over the country until he clinched the nomination.

This week Obama embarked on a whirlwind tour of the Middle East and Europe, taking most of the American press corps, including all three of the major networks' news anchors with him, visiting nine countries in less than a week.

In Iraq, Prime Minister Nouri Al Maliki all but endorsed Obama's tentative 16-month plan for withdrawing troops from the country, and in the photographs of Obama with General Petraeus in that helicopter, the two men seemed so chummy they looked like they might hold hands.  In Israel, hosting Obama for dinner, Prime Minister Ehud Olmert said of the Senator, and I quote: "I know how friendly you are, and I know how much you care for us."  Sounds like the Prime Minister has a crush too.

Perhaps the most impressive public display of affection for my man, er, candidate, during his foray abroad occurred yesterday in Berlin's Tiergarten Park. Two hundred thousand Germans crammed into the space between the Brandenburg Gate and the Victory Column, cheering and frantically waving American flags, a scene very different from the one I had seen only a few years earlier, where hardly any of the Europeans I knew would touch an American flag with a ten foot pole.

Before Obama's speech a German friend of mine living in New York called me to say that his sister had phoned him from Germany at five o'clock in the morning shouting, in what I can only imagine was her best Heidi Klum voice: "Barack Obama is coming to Germany!  Barack Obama is coming to Germany!"  She had taken the day off work and was driving five hours from Munich to Berlin to see him speak.

The world has a crush on Barack Obama.

Here's why this is a good thing. After years of mistrust and misgivings about American dynastic politics embodied by George W. Bush, and an extended period of American unpopularity overseas, the world is starved for a new kind of American leadership. The world wants to like America again and, more importantly, wants to stand with America to face the challenges of a new Era. As Barack Obama so often says, the United States cannot solve the problems it faces alone. Terrorism, global warming, the energy crisis, nuclear proliferation--we need the support, cooperation, trust, and, yes, the love of the international community to deal with these titanic threats to the American way of life.

To that end, electing a rock star president who the whole world is crushed out on couldn't possibly hurt.  Barack Obama offers a new vision of America, an America that is ready to lead the world again, not through unilateral Bush-style dictating, but through diplomacy, internationalism, and old-fashioned American likeability.

Today Obama travels to France to meet with French president Nicolas Sarkozy. I'm sure Barack will enchant the French as he has enchanted the rest of the world, but I better not hear about any of that kissing they're famous for over there, or I'm going to be jealous.