The World Pleased Obama's the Nominee
nyt: That anticipatory exuberance cut across party lines. Just in France, Ségolène Royal, President Nicolas Sarkozy’s Socialist rival in last year’s French presidential election, said in a telephone interview that Mr. Obama “embodies the America of today and tomorrow.”
Equally enthusiastically, Patrick Devedjian, the head of President Sarkozy’s center-right political party, called Mr. Obama’s candidacy ‘’a very beautiful image of America, the image of a candidate who transcends race and got to where he is because of merit alone.” And Bertrand Delanoë, the mayor of Paris, declared: “His candidacy carries an enormous hope for his country and for peace in the world.”
But there were some dissident voices in Europe and the Arab world in this pro-Obama orthodoxy.
As Josef Joffe, the publisher and editor of the prestigious German weekly Die Zeit, wrote in a Web posting: “The spirit of the times is for Obama — even if less so in Asia, Africa and Latin America than in western Europe. But an optical illusion may be influencing our mood — notably the comforting picture that it is not America but George W. Bush that is the problem. Out goes the ‘cowboy,’ in comes Change and Hope, and we can love America again.”
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iht: Gerard Baker, the U.S. editor of The Times of London, wrote: "In 220 years a country that has steadily multiplied in diversity, where ethnic minorities and women have risen to the very highest positions in so many fields of human life, has chosen a succession of 42 white men as its leader. For good measure, the vice presidency, the only other nationally directly elected position in the US government, has been held by a succession of 46 white males."
"But last night, in a tumultuous break with this long history, the ultimate realization of the American dream moved a little closer, and a black man became his party's nominee for the presidency," Baker wrote.
Word of Obama's claim, following primaries in Montana and South Dakota, came too late for some European newspaper deadlines, but breakfast radio and television shows, along with many websites, gave his announcement almost the same attention as it drew in the United States.
