Obama's Travels

America is enthralled with Obama's current tour overseas. And I am beginning to see Obama's strategy behind why he is doing it and the way he is doing it. And I must say its quite brilliant.

I remember when GHW Bush first took over from Ronald Reagan, people like me took sometime to adjust to seeing him as president. The comparison is till too fresh in the mind. Even my sister said he did simply was not as polished and classy as Reagan. A similar thing happenned when Clinton got elected. He seemed very young and the wind blew his hair about; and my father said he had a husky voice. A few years later, my father remarked that Clinton is "becoming more and more steady as a President". Moral of the story: it takes time to be visualized as President of the United States.

And I suspect, for many Americans it was just this little bit harder to visualize a black man as President of the United States. Especially when his opponents seem to think he is too young and inexperienced.

So imagine being fed images like his press conference yesterday at the hilltop Temple of Hercules with Amman, Jordan behind his as back drop. It was a commanding performance in both image and substance. The media is starting to talk about Obama's gravitas. And there are images of him meeting foreign heads of states where due to his advantage in height, he came across as comfortable and in command. Slowly, like in Isreal today, praise from his foreign hosts will leak out and who is more credible? Some GOP congressman from the Midwest riling at his lack of experience or the King of Jordan?

So I see this strategy in play: Put simply, instead of running against McCain he is running against George W Bush. Very cleverly, he is changing the reference point with whom he is compared to from John to George (and reinforcing the impression that John is the same as George anyway). More than just showing people that he can clear the bar as President and Commander-in-Chief; he is giving Americans a glimpse of how good it feels to have a President who is intelligent and respected, and how good it feels for the world to love America (which I suspect is the enduring image Obama wishes to present from his speech in Berlin tomorrow - imagine how an American would feel if the crowd roars aprovingly when Obama tells them how proud he is of being an American?)

In the best of times, Washington is not the best place in the world to learn about the world. The foreign policy circle in Washington can be quite insular and populated by swarms of policy peddlers and people with opinions and contacts to hawk about. Much if not most of them are in a perpetual revolving door between (often junior) government positions, policy think-tanks and lobbying firms. Occasionally, they organize junkets or conferences for policy makers to visit the relevant parts of the world and be fed a certain world-view. Taken as a whole, that in my opinion, does not make a very good training ground for foreign policy experience.

This much I know from just reading his books. He studied international relations in Columbia University. He spent his childhood in Hawaii (which is as foreign as it gets in the USA) and in Indonesia. He backpacked through Europe for a month. He has visited his mother and room mate in Pakistan. He has been to Kenya at least 3 times and he has been back to Indonesia as well (finishing his first book in Bali). And yes, as senator he has been to Kenya, Isreal, Russia, Uzbekistan, the UK and Iraq. In his book, he wrote knowledgeably about global issues.

In stock market investing, people say that you can make money from information that the market does not know and information the market ignored. The conventional wisdom has mistakenly assumed that just because he had a short resume in Washington that he has little foreign policy experience. Most Americans, I am convinced, are in for a surprise how much he knows about the world; because so far, his savviness with the world has been ignored.