"I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character."
Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, August 28,1963
We are the ones we have been waiting for.
Barack Obama
Speech following Super Tuesday results, Feb 5, 2008.
Barack Obama has the world on fire. He has got our imagination on hyper-drive.
200,000 Berliners and other mostly European nationals greeted Obama in July. For me, that event alone sums it up for Obama. For students of history, a black man talking about a new world order to Europeans in the heart of Europe where two world wars originated, is as symbolic as the coming down of the Berlin Wall it self. Maybe even more.
And…. a Yahoo search for Barack Obama produced 539,000,000 pages.
The Economist via Economist.com is conducting an on-going on-line voting for non-Americans from all over the world to cast their vote. We now get to ‘choose’ who should become the President of the United States of America! What an irony….nobody ever asks me who should become the Prime Minister of my own country. Anyway…
I did a quick survey on the voting patterns last week and this is what I found out: in almost all the countries that I checked on, Obama is leading the vote count except for Iraq where too few people have voted. I guess the Iraqis are not in the mood right now.
Anyway the following are the few countries that I managed to check on and their corresponding % of voters who have voted for Obama:
1. Malaysia : 90%
2. Singapore : 87%
3. India : 86%
4. UAE : 97%
5. Britain : 89%
6. Japan : 86%
7. Uganda : 95%
8. Iran : 85%
9. China : 83%
10. Afghanistan : 89%
11. Indonesia : 96%
12. Russia : 85%
And according to the Time Magazine website, a total of 85% of all readers have voted for Obama!
Why?
Obama is viewed as a harbinger of change. He is supposed to herald a new beginning for the USA and as an extension of that, to the rest of the world. His election to the highest office in world politics will be the final healing that the United States need to move away from it’s discriminatory past. A black man in the White House! They should make it a tourist attraction to see all the faces of the KKK in the deep south.. Would be worth the money.
But I can see why the rest of us are all fired up by Obama and find it a little ironic too! 90% of Malaysians have voted for Obama but I wonder how many of them will be willing to accept a Malaysian Indian to be the next Prime Minister. 86% of Japanese voted for Obama but how many there will accept a woman to be the prime minister. I can understand the 86% of Indians in India who voted for Obama though. Here is one country predominantly Hindu and male-dominated but yet has a female President, a Sikh prime minister and had a Muslim President recently. The leading party of the present government is led by a Caucasian Catholic female! So, it makes sense for the Indians to choose Obama. They do have a history of acceptance of diversity.
Anyway, I suppose everybody will have their own reasons for choosing Obama. He represents different values for different people. For the colored people (of course, white/fair skin is also a colour but I think you know what I mean) of the world, Obama’s rise to the pinnacle of world politics will be sweet justice for a world that has for so long looked down upon them. The curse of being ‘coloured’ is finally being lifted. Obama, whether he is elected or not next month, will symbolize a new turning point in race based politics. It’s not that race and skin colour will not matter but they will matter less. Not since Jesse Owens has the coloured people of the world has been so electrified. For Malaysian Indians, Obama will also represent a new faith in themselves. With Hindraf having rekindled their faith in themselves (although much work needs to be done to channel this energy to positive outlets; a task made difficult by our fumbling Syed Hamid Albar) Malaysian Indians will see that there is no limit to their road to a better future. You can’t stop the cream from rising.
As for the rest of us who are slightly more colour blind, Obama may represent a new hope for a new world order. A new order based on mutual respect and understanding. Obama is hoped to signify the shift from western dominated unilateral thinking to a more inclusive and global perspective. Obama has the influence of many cultures within him. He has some connections or other with Indonesia, Sabah (his brother-in-law’s parents originate from Sabah). He has roots in Kenya. He has been exposed to Islam. He is highly educated. In contrast, America and its politics hitherto are identified with people like Sarah Palin who only got her passport last month! For most Americans, like Palin, the world is America and America is the world. Anything that does not jive with this deserves to be bombed out of existence or at least boycotted to oblivion.
But then now we have Obama. Could he be different? Will we see a more noble and humble America? Maybe. But lets not forget as what Karim Raslan says, in the final analyses and when the brouhaha of the America election is over and when the dust settles, the victor needs to answer to his constituency and that is the American people. This will apply to Obama too. Obama (or Mc Cain) will become the President of the American people and they will have to play to their gallery whether they like it or not.
Yet, we hope that Obama will be more than just an American President. We hope that he can infuse new values into American politics and that he can make Americans understand that Uncle Sam’s hegemony is no longer in tune with world affairs. If America had so much good will from its Marshall Plan, if America was briefly loved in this part of the world after the Tsunami, it was because the world had a glimpse of American soft power. We saw a gentler side of this giant. It was so intoxicating like the good old days just after World War II.
Obama carries the hope of all of us that America needs to look beyond it self and its self- interests alone. This is a responsibility of a true super-power. World politics will only get more complicated. The end of the cold-war was supposed to see the end of divisive world politics but it has actually brought about a discordant state of affairs. The rise of China and India, the increasingly assertive Russia longing for its imperial past, the birth of nations bent on avoiding main stream world politics, the precarious conditions of nuclear powered nations like Pakistan, and the great dichotomy of east versus west political rhetoric by small-minded politicians the world over will only make the job of keeping peace that much harder. We don’t need to add to this problem with a return to American cow-boy style gun-ship politics. American military power will always be needed to keep the balance and its show of strength will be a comforting feeling for the ‘free’ world no matter how much we would hate to admit to that. But we would prefer a noble super-power.
Personally, I am doubtful that Obama can do what we hope he should do. Let’s face it. He needs to answer to his political backers, the huge American corporations and industrial captains who are bank rolling him. There is no free lunch in politics. American economy is closely tied to its military complex and it will take dozens of Obama to undo that even if America had the will for it. Obama, will have to play a tricky role in world politics. It will be anybody’s guess how he will treat China although he seems to echo a new vision of international relations. And how is he going to get America out of the mess in Iraq and Afghanistan and I think the Bush administration is going to leave him another headache by increasingly attacking terrorists camps deep within Pakistan.
In world economics, Obama will be a relatively new face. By now, Capitol Hill is probably drawing up plans to ensure that no ‘foreign ‘elements’ try to hoodwink the young president. They would be prepared to ‘protect’ Obama from economic decisions that could harm America. This is the politically correct way of saying : Status quo as usual.
All in all, the day after Obama is elected (if at all he gets elected) will be the same as today. However there will be a difference in another realm; man’s mind. The results from this will be seen in a generation or two; hopefully. A new paradigm will be born. Hope for equality and the brotherhood of man will find a new ray of light. The light that was lit by such giants like Gandhi, Martin Luther King, and Nelson Mandela will once again flicker brightly. We will have hope to believe that man kind is capable of peace and love and understanding. We will have reasons to believe that nations can co-habit this planet peacefully and that people of different faiths can live in peace.
In the final analyses, Obama is but the first step on a long and treacherous journey for equality and peace. He will either become a doyen of a new era or he will be remembered by a “ oh well…it was an experiment…” by line in the history books.
As for us in the world of business, Obama or no Obama, life will be that much more difficult especially for those among us who have had a ‘business as usual” attitude.
Its business un-usual just as an un-usual thing is going to happen to American politics. Well, almost!
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