[Undertoad]

This blogger agrees with you:

Why It’s Suddenly Okay For the World To Feel Good About the U.S. Again

I covered eight presidential campaigns as a reporter and editor and am now involved in yet another as a blogger, but I have never seen a global explosion of enthusiasm for a candidate like that for Barack Obama since his Iowa caucus victory. That groundswell continues to grow as polls show that he may hand Hillary Clinton a second defeat today in New Hampshire.

A blizzard of stories in the foreign press, including fawning accounts from correspondents usually known for their reserve, have a common denominator:

They draw on an abiding hatred of George Bush and his politics of division that have driven America’s world standing to an historic low. Now, this chorus of voices in the foreign press is saying, there is an opportunity for that nightmare to end because of Obama and his politics of change.

Shorter version: It’s suddenly okay to feel good about America again.

Amazingly:

...commenters on my article at the Australian website and my own Aussie friends are pretty much of a like mind: Obama is like a soothing rain in the parched Outback compared Bush’s scorched earth leadership.

Australians are fiercely proud, well understand their nation’s place on the Pacific Rim and in the greater world and know American politics better than many Yanks. This helps explain why they turned out Prime Minister John Howard, Bush’s biggest cheerleader after British PM Tony Blair, late last year despite an unprecedented 12-year economic boom.

Aussies were deeply insulted when Bush, who moments earlier had confused APEC with OPEC at an APEC conference in September at the Sydney Opera House, declared that he was “happy to be in Austria” while Howard’s successor, Kevin Rudd, by contrast was having a conversation in fluent Mandarin with a Chinese statesman.

Bush, of course, cannot even conduct a conversation in fluent English, but that is not the point.

Metaphorically speaking, the world is brown eyed and the U.S. is blue eyed. America always has been a convenient punching bag for what ails the world, but people are sick and tired of the blue-eyed American imperialist president running roughshod. In terms of change, Obama is viewed as being brown eyed — that is to say one of them — by many people abroad but Clinton and the rest of the presidential wannabes are blue eyed.