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Friday, November 7, 2008
Latin America not expecting too much from Obama
With the U.S. facing the worst financial crisis in a generation, many here believe Obama will be far too preoccupied with fixing the U.S. economy to get into a battle over immigration.
In Mexico and throughout Latin America the feeling is that the Bush administration has largely ignored the region. If it didn’t have to do with drugs or border security, most here believed, the United States wasn’t interested. Now that worries over terrorism have been replaced by worries over a cratering economy, Latin America still seems far from becoming a focus for the incoming administration.
“Obama has said little about the relationship with Mexico and in fact, there’s little to be hopeful about in the short term,” wrote the influential Mexico City daily El Universal on Wednesday.
And here’s what Mexico City office worker Juan Juarez told us when we did a round of man on the street interviews after the election: “I think that for Mexico it doesn’t make a big difference who won the presidential election in the United States, since the Americans will continue their cold and distant way of treating issues of importance to us like immigration reform.”
That sentiment echoed throughout the region. Guatemalan Chamber of Commerce President Edgardo Wagner said he isn’t expecting much from an Obama presidency. “The issue of immigration will continue to be treated the same way,” he said. “If in better times the United States didn’t support us, now even less so.”
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Obamamania in China
The photograph on the cover of Friday’s China Daily showed a poster of Michael Jordan soaring towards a slam dunk — with a picture of President-elect Barack Obama taped over his head.
The image highlights China’s growing infatuation with Obama. While Beijing analysts expected a McCain or Obama administration to have similar China policies, average Chinese have been caught up in the global Obamamania.
“The Illinois senator has fans all across the globe,” an editorial by Raymond Zhou in the China Daily read on Friday. “And over here in China, he seems to have a grip on the imagination of Chinese youth.”
One recent survey on the China Daily’s website found that 80 percent of respondents preferred Obama to McCain.
Why do Chinese like Obama?
According to informal poll Zhou conducted on Beijing college campuses, the top reason was that “Obama belongs to an ethnic minority, which will change the way people outside America perceive racism and the American Dream,” Zhou wrote.
Other respondents said they expected an Obama administration would be more likely to work with foreign governments than a McCain administration would have been.
Even Beijing seems to be warming to Obama. An official editorial in the China Daily, the mouthpiece of the Chinese Communist Party, called Obama’s message “forceful and uplifting”.
“China waits to see the change it can believe in,” the paper said.
