A Clearer Perspective

Within the past week, New York Times columnist and former foreign correspondent for the newspaper, Roger Cohen, has written two interesting opinion pieces relating Barack Obama’s family history, and the effect his presidency would have on world foreign relations.
Cohen, now reporting for the Times from Nairobi, Kenya provides an interesting angle on Obama as the next possible world leader by letting us gain a glimpse of the presidential race as seen from Obama’s country of heritage.His father, Barack Obama Sr., was born in the Nyanza Province of Kenya and worked as a domestic servant to the British. Obama, now undoubtedly one of the most well-known faces in the world, was at that point just a little boy helping his father herd goats.

The future Democratic presidential hopeful was born in Hawaii, where his father and Indonesian mother met while going to college. Obama attended schools in Jakarta, Indonesia where classes were taught in the local language. When he was ten, he moved back to Hawaii with his mother, and henceforth began a life of traveling and moving, including his college years spent at Harvard.

“Piecing together Barack Obama’s family is like piecing together the world. It’s a rich experience, but not easy,” Cohen writes in “The Obamas of the World” on March 6.

I like Obama, although he wouldn’t be my first choice for President (see my former Ron Paul-supporting blogs for that), but I have been fascinated throughout this presidential campaign so far by the prospect of having a man like him in the White House. Not only would he make history by being America’s first black president, but he also brings with him a cultural background so diverse that I think it would be an asset to world relations if for no other reason than to give the appearance of an America led by a man who can be, as Cohen puts it “in dialogue with the world.”

In one campaign speech last year, Hillary Clinton, in clear reference to her rival, had sniped “voters will judge whether living in a foreign country at the age of 10 prepares one to face the big complex international challenges the next president will face.”

I would argue, that yes, to some degree it does. Although his father was an atheist, Obama’s young years in Kenya were spent among the predominantly Muslim population there, and as a teenager, he first began to understand racism as a black person in Hawaii. These aren’t the kinds of cultural experiences you can put on a resume, but they are the kinds of life changing experiences that would affect how a future president were to handle diplomatic relations.

In his second Obama column, “Tribalism Here, and There” on March 10, Cohen writes again, “The main forces in the world today are the modernizing, barrier-breaking sweep of globalization and the tribal reaction to it, which lies in the assertion of religious, national, linguistic, racial or ethnic identity against the unifying technological tide…. America’s peaceful tribes are also out in force.

As Obama and Hillary Clinton engage in the long war for the Democratic nomination, we have the black vote, and the Latino vote, and the women-over-50 vote, and the Volvo-driving liberal-intellectual vote, and the white blue-collar vote, and the urban vote, and the rural vote, and the under-30s vote — sub-groups with shared social, cultural, linguistic or other traits and interests… That’s democracy at work. Sure.

But the United States is divided, within itself and from the world, in growing ways. It is divided by war, by income chasms, by foreclosures, by political polarization and by culture wars. Increasingly it is looked upon from outside with dismay or alarm. Healing, within and without, will be a central task of the next president.”

I encourage you to read these columns because, if nothing else, it gives you an outside glimpse of what the rest of the world may be seeing as they watch the race for the presidency of the world’s most powerful nation. And in a world increasingly divided by “tribalism,” as Cohen puts it, that’s a view worth understanding.