Public Diplomacy

The conservative-leaning London newsdaily the Daily Telegraph commissioned a poll on Europeans’ preferences for the next US president.

The poll of 6,200 people in Britain, France, Germany, Italy and Russia, finds that, across all countries polled, Senator Obama received 52 percent of the popular vote, while Senator McCain received 15 percent. Senator Clinton was not included in the poll.

The survey was carried out by the British survey research company YouGov.

The poll inspired a variety of reporting from the Telegraph’s correspondents throughout Europe, discussing the findings of the poll in each of the six countries.

First, the poll inspired this insightful article about the French public’s penchant for Anti-American, and how this becomes channeled into Anti-Sarkozyism, due to his strong pro-US stance.  The article also discusses this public’s views of Senator Obama, their choice for US President:

“Overwhelming support for Barack Obama in the YouGov poll is logical: the French always back the Democrat candidate — considered more conservative than their mainstream right-wing party.

But with Mr Obama, that tendency is even more marked than usual. Last year, France voted for a “clean break” with past ways of governing by electing Mr Sarkozy. “There is a desire to see the same change in the US, with a young, half-caste leader. The anti-Bush candidate par excellence,” said Miss Lepri.

Although few French know his economic programme, they trust him to solve the world’s financial problems more than Senator John McCain because of his perceived “multilateral approach, open to others, which is a good thing for the international community,” she said.

Mr Obama’s election also appeals to high-minded French idealism as proof that America is open-minded and not racist, Mrs Lepri said. But this view was hypocritical, she added, as the French were far from ready to elect a black president themselves.”

***

Second, the Telegraph’s Rome correspondent discussed the Italian findings of the poll, namely the fact that Italians were the only public to diverge from the European majority and say that the US is a force for good, rather than evil, in the world.

In regards to the presumptive presidential candidates, the article relates:

“Out of their disappointments with President Bush has grown from a love of Barack Obama. Fan clubs for the Illinois senator have sprung up across Italy and on the Internet. Italians see him not only as stylish and sharply dressed, but, as one commentator put it: “he is the sense of change incarnate”. An astonishing 70 per cent of respondents supported him in the Telegraph poll.

Italians yearn for a similar political change – their politicians remain in the system for decade after decade. In the Italian election in April, Walter Veltroni, the leader of the Italian Democratic Party, tried to capitalise on the popular support for Mr Obama.

Not only did he refer to himself as an “Italian Obama” throughout the campaign, he even appropriated his “Yes We Can” slogan and translated it into Italian “Si puo fare!” Sadly, the tactic only served to highlight the differences between the two.

Unlike the stylish black senator, John McCain is seen in Italy as a slightly crumpled version of Silvio Berlusconi, due to their similar ages. Mr McCain is one year older than Italy’s prime minister.

He unwittingly reinforced his antiquity in a recent interview with Il Sole 24 Ore, a financial newspaper. Seeking to boost his popularity in Italy, Mr McCain spoke gushingly about Italy as “the scene of all [his] best memories”.

“Ah Italy, Italy, the best parts of my life were there. To be a single young man, well, Italy was a paradise,” he said. However, those memories date back from the early 1960s, when he was a pilot with the Sixth Fleet in Naples.

He did score some points, however, by referring to his 95-year-old mamma, always a strong card to play in a land where every man speaks to his mother at least once a day.

His lack of general support, however, was reflected in only 20 per cent of Italians thinking he is better equipped than Mr Obama to steer the US out of its economic woes. “

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The Telegraph’s Moscow correspondent set the Russian public opinionwithin the broader historical context of US-Soviet relations. According to this report, these relations have lead to slightly more favorability toward the Republican party among Russians, compared to the other nations polled.

“The survey shows that John McCain enjoys more support in Russia than most of the G8. While he still trailed Barack Obama by seven per cent, 24 per cent of Russians said they could vote for him if they could — compared to just eight per cent of French respondents.

In Soviet times it was generally agreed that the Kremlin preferred to see a Republican in the White House. Conservatives were more straightforward to deal with because they acted from self-interest and were less concerned with human rights than their Democratic rivals, it was reckoned.

Mr McCain, however, has been roundly criticised in the Russian media for his antagonistic opinions towards Moscow. He has long called for Russia’s expulsion from the G8, has been scathing about Mr Putin and dismissed the country’s presidential elections in March as “rigged”.

While Mr Obama has hardly been fulsome about Russia, his criticism has been far more muted. That his lead over his Republican rival is so slim probably has much to do with prejudice in a country where old-fashioned racism is still largely acceptable.

Many respondents, however, were equally dubious about both candidates with some 45 per cent saying they did not know who they would vote for or admitting they would vote for neither — a much higher proportion than the samples taken in other G8 countries.”

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In the article titled “Germany seduced by ‘Messiah’ Barack Obama: US election 2008,” the Telgraph’s Berlin correspondent relatesthat for Germans, “The survey shows that those hopes [for a better US-German relationship] are pinned squarely on one man: Barack Obama.”

The article continues:

“Germans are very much taken with his multi-cultural background and particularly his air of aristocratic humility,” said Constanze Stelzenmüller, director of the German Marshall Fund in Berlin.

So while the outgoing American President will visit Germany in two weeks time, on a trip sure to bring protests, the real buzz is coming from rumours that Mr Obama is to visit Berlin too.

For the man so-often described as “the new Kennedy”, an address in the city where one of America’s favourite leaders made one of his most famous speeches in 1963 would be a powerful statement of a new US entente with Europe.

“If a US presidential hopeful visits Berlin, holding a speech at the Brandenburg Gate and going afterward to the Kennedy Museum, it provides powerful images,” said Karsten Voigt, envoy for German-American relations.

Whether or not Obama declares “Ich bin ein Berliner” any visit would be a throwback to a much happier time when German-US relations were not soured by Iraq.

Just last month, German foreign minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier called for a new turn in the EU-US relationship, and said he had spoken personally to Mr Obama on the issue.

Two months before that, Germany’s celebrated magazine Der Spiegel called him a political ’Messiah’ and previous polls have found he is the most popular of all three potential US presidents in Germany.

But analysts warn that enthusiasm could be misplaced.

“There could be a crisis of unfulfilled expectations,” said Constanze Stelzenmüller. “Germans have this notion that Bush was a nightmare from which we are all about to wake up, but the truth is the world really has changed since 9/11.”

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Last but not least, the Telegraph’s coverage of the poll included an article about Briton’s views toward the US Presidential campaign. The article starts off by warning: “Whoever becomes the next US president, the poll suggests he or she will have a great deal of work to do to repair the Special Relationship and restore the standing of the US in the eyes of the British public.”

The article continues: “Asked about November’s presidential election, British people overwhelmingly want the Democrats to capture the White House and end eight years of Republican rule in the US.

Some 49 per cent of UK respondents said that if they could vote in the contest, they would back Mr Obama, an Illinois senator who would be the first black president in US history.

By contrast, only 14 per cent said they would vote for Mr McCain, a veteran Arizona senator best known in the UK as a former Vietnam prisoner of war.

British voters have slightly more faith in Mr McCain as an economic leader, however.

Asked which of the two contenders would be “better equipped to lead the world economy out of its current difficulties,” Mr Obama’s lead narrows. The UK poll puts him on 37 per cent, ahead of Mr McCain on 17 per cent.”

The presumptive candidates have had a bit more contact with British political leaders, the article tells that these two nations’ corresponding parties have already made ties:

Mr Brown met both Mr Obama and Mr McCain – along with Hillary Clinton – on a visit to the US last month.

The Prime Minister has been careful to remain neutral about the race in public, but the Labour Party’s historic ties to the Democrats and widespread unease about the Bush Administration’s foreign policy mean that most Labour ministers and MPs would back Mr Obama over Mr McCain.

The Tories, however, have a more ambiguous view of the presidential battle.

Mr McCain has a long-standing relationship with the Conservatives, and has appeared at Tory conferences as a guest of David Cameron, the Conservative leader.

Mr Cameron has even tested diplomatic convention by coming close to endorsing Mr McCain as the next president, telling the World Economic Forum in Davos in January that he “admired him a great deal”.

Liam Fox, the Conservatives shadow defence spokesman, has strong ties with senior Republicans and members of the Bush Administration.

But with US polls suggesting the Democrats are the favourites in the November vote, and with evidence emerging that British voters are warming to Mr Obama, Mr Cameron has sought to strengthen his party’s relationship with Democrats.

Some Conservative commentators have even sought to draw parallels between Mr Cameron and Mr Obama, pointing out that both are young, charismatic and relatively inexperienced politicians who have taken on their party’s establishments.”

***

No doubt polling is incredibly expensive. That the Telegraphwould go to the trouble to measure the attitudes of six publics on political leaders that they won’t actually have the opportunity to elect speaks to what’s at stake in this election–and more broadly the extent to which the United States’ leadership stands to effect the lives of Europeans.

In the “gotcha” spirit of our current politics, CNN is rudely replaying the archival footage of Scott McClellan dismissing Richard Clarke’s tell-all book, written after Clarke left the Bush Administration in the wake of 9/11. “Why didn’t he tell the President these things when he was in the White House, rather than waiting until he left?” McClellan says from the podium of the White House Press Room back in 2004. Switch to the current White House spokesman, Dana Perino, from the same podium, speaking yesterday about McClellan’s own just-published tell-all account of the Bush Administration he once served: “The President is puzzled, and he doesn’t recognize this as the Scott McClellan that he hired and confided in and worked with for so many years,” Perino says, adding that Bush is “disappointed that if he had these concerns and these thoughts, he never came to him or anyone else on the staff.”

What we have here, to quote the famous line from the Sixties, is a failure to communicate. It’s hard and often hazardous to one’s career for a staffer to tell a President he’s wrong. By the same token, it’s easy, and often profitable, for a staffer, once out of office, to publish his criticisms in a book. Take your pick which explanation you find more convincing.

One of McClellan’s complaints is a familiar one – that he was misled by Bush White House officials. Many if not most White House spokesmen complain at some point about being misled or kept unaware of important developments, so this is hardly news. However, it appears that a good part of McClellan’s book is really an attack on the Administration’s motives as it tried to tell its story via the media. Here McClellan alleges that the President sold the American people on Iraq having Weapons of Mass Destruction as a pretext for conducting a militarily-led project to spread democracy in the Middle East.

If such is indeed the case, we are indeed in a sorry state. Seeing Iraq as an incubator for Middle East democracy required a lively imagination, even back in 2003. Willingly selling a war under false pretenses would be reprehensible. As nearly as one can tell from the initial reviews, McClellan makes the hypothesis without providing proof. Maybe he really wasn’t in the loop.

The larger context for this discussion is our Election Year, the outgoing President’s low approval ratings, and the efforts of so many Republicans to distance themselves from the White House. Much like a consumer product fallen into disrepute, the Republican Party is looking to re-brand itself. The first step is to do some brand research, which Representative Tom Davis, Republican from northern Virginia, does in one of the most remarkable documents of this election year. The 20-page document is well worth reading in its entirety. He writes: “Members [of Congress] and pundits waiting for Democrats to fumble the ball, so that soft Republicans and Independents will snap back to the GOP, fail to understand the deep seeded antipathy toward the President, the war, gas prices, the economy, foreclosures and, in some areas, the underlying cultural differences that continue to brand our party.”

As Davis makes clear, Republicans overall need a new image. McCain will not help, since he is not branding himself as a Republican, but rather as a patriot (to the conservative audiences) and as an environmentalist and maverick (to independents and Democrats).

McCain is following his strategy rather well, and is immeasurably helped by the disunity among the Democrats. No matter what Hillary says, she is John McCain’s greatest ally. Not only is she sowing doubts about Obama’s “electability,” she is undermining the image of the Democratic Party right now by fighting the Party’s authority to impose discipline on party leaders in Michigan and Florida.

It may yet turn out that, in this remarkable year, Democrats as well as Republicans will find their brand out of favor with most Americans, and the selling of the next President will begin with the “selling” of a new brand for each candidate. Pity the incumbent members of Congress who haven’t read Tom Davis’ memo.

This blog is dedicated to relating how the US Presidential candidates view the world and are viewed by it.

Washington Post Editorial Page Editor and columnist Fried Hiatt penned compared the worlviews of Senators McCain and Obama by pulling back the curtains on the recent row over Obama’s policy of taking with US enemies.

In the column titled “The Belligerent vs. the Naif?” Hiatt calls the row “overblown…something of a teacup in a much larger tempest.” He argues that the Senators’ argument is “a proxy, and it won’t be the last, that allows the candidates to imply much bigger differences in worldview that they can’t always state directly.”

Hiatt proposes assessing the two candidates’ worldviews by imaginging what the opposing party’s foreign policy advisors might say about them, drunk on truth serum:

“If Democratic foreign policy advisers were to speak honestly about McCain, they would call him bellicose and uncompromising, by philosophy and nature. His unwillingness to engage with Castro or Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, they would say, bespeaks an inflexibility unsuited to a complex world. His proposed League of Democracies proves he doesn’t believe in the United Nations or other existing international institutions, insists on playing on his field and by his rules, and can’t come to terms with regimes he does not like or with the transnational threats of the 21st century. His strong moralistic streak, they might say, blinded him to the risks of invading Iraq and will get the country in trouble again. His age, his record and his party all make it impossible for him to give the United States the fresh start in the world that it so desperately needs.

Republican advisers, by contrast, would call Obama naive and overconfident, a dangerous combination in international affairs. With his initial insouciance [indifference] about talking with dictators, they might say, he overvalued his own charm and the power of reason and undervalued economic and military might and other forms of leverage. His insistence that Afghanistan is more vital than Iraq, a large, oil-rich Arab nation at the heart of the Middle East, reflects a fundamental misunderstanding of national interest. And, they might say, he emerged from Hyde Park and academe with a sense that the United States on balance has done more harm than good in the world — and that international laws and organizations that constrain American power therefore should be welcomed.”

Surprisingly, Hiatts argues that while these caricatures point out real differences in each candidates’ worldview, “the imperatives and constraints of leadership would push them toward converging policies.”

Even campaigning, the candidates have reasons to move toward common ground. McCain will emphasize the importance of alliances and Obama will not be outflanked on his support for a strong military because Americans want both diplomacy and strength. Both will talk about promoting democracy and human rights because Americans want that, too.

Neither candidate may deem it in his interest to focus on Iraq, which once looked certain to be the central issue of this campaign, since McCain supported a war that has taken more than 4,000 American lives and is now seen by most Americans as a terrible mistake, while Obama was wrong about the surge and is now committed to withdrawing troops just as they may be succeeding. Neither has a convincing formula for keeping Iran from going nuclear, but it would not be politically wise for either to talk about post-nuclear containment. So, at least for now, it may be difficult for them to engage on the big questions.”

In the end, Hiatt points out that we have a lot to learn about the two forerunners–but that campaign politics may prevent us from doing that. While it seems too early to judge either candidate on this first major foreign policy-related campaign spat, relying on caricatures of a “belligerant” McCain and a “naif” Obama doesn’t satisfy either.

Looks like we’ll have to wait for the candidates to fill in the gaps themselves.

Senator Obama’s policy of negotiating with our enemies has come under fire recently from both Senator McCain as well as from Senator Clinton.

Philip Fernando the former editor of a Sri Lankan paper, the Sunday Observer, weighs in on the issue in a piece published yesterday by the Asian Tribune.

Here’s an excerpt:

“Obama has seized the opening he got branding the reversal of the openness in foreign policy by the Bush-McCain combo a serious flaw in US policy. His foreign policy stance based on productive diplomacy has not diminished his popularity. It only reminded voters of McCain’s ties to Bush, whose approval rating is now at record lows. The vastly unpopular Iraq war added to McCain’s woes.

There is greater response to the Obama style “think as you govern” approach to foreign policy judging by the following he has. The doctrinaire right or left-wing theories with scant results to show for them are becoming obsolete.

McCain is openly challenging that position calling Obama’s attempt to have tea with Ahmadinejad or Raul Castro is an extremely risky business. Whether the electorate has the stomach to digest that would remain one of defining moments of the 2008 election campaign.

McCain has attacked Obama’s foreign policy stance repeatedly. President Bush used the fear factor effectively to win his second term in 2004-potential terrorist attacks dominated his speeches. McCain may be relying on the posture that he is stronger on defense and paint Obama as a weakling.

But Iraq war is not an easy one for the Republicans to swallow after the announcement “mission accomplished” Iraq four years go, still lingering in memory. Many point to the fact that US foreign policy under Bush had not made any gains in the international field. The country is looking isolationist and less secure. Fierce diplomacy as the first option is becoming a major campaign focus.”

Steven Barnes, Assistant Dean of Public Affairs at Princeton University’s Woodrow Wilson School authored an op-ed for the International Herald Tribune yesterday. It discusses what is yet known of the three presidential candidates’ public diplomacy strategies. Here’s a summary from Barnes’ piece.

Senator Obama:

In an interview with the San Fransisco Chronicle in February (listen to it here), Senator Obama “talked of funding “America Houses” overseas that would “incorporate youth centers and libraries that are needed throughout the broader Muslim world.”

He also promised to establish a “Voice Corps” - an administration would “rapidly recruit and train fluent speakers of Arabic, Bahasa, Farsi, Urdu and Turkish who can ensure our voice is heard - and that we listen - throughout the world.”"

Senator Clinton:

Barnes relates that “Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton’s foreign policy speeches have included the theme of re-establishing America’s “moral authority” on the world stage.” Here’s a recent example from a speech theSenator made in Kentucky last week:

“We are in this race because we believe it will take a commander-in-chief with the strength and knowledge to end the war in Iraq safely and quickly, and a president with experience representing the people of the United States in more than 80 countries to restore our leadership and moral authority in the world.”

Senator McCain:

 Barnes notes that last year McCain outlined a key element of his plan for overseas outreach in an interview with the Orlando Sentinel:

“I would establish a single, independent agency responsible for all of America’s public diplomacy,” he said. Such an agency would, among other things, establish “American libraries with Internet access throughout the world” and create “a professional corps of public-diplomacy experts who speak the local language and whose careers are spent promoting American values, ideas, culture and education.”

Finally, if you look hard, you might see within Barnes’ commentary a mention of a certain blog…

The forthcoming issue of The Atlantic contains a report on Senator Obama’s foreign policy by Matthew Yglesias, the magazine’s Associate Editor.

The article begins:

“Barack Obama has always been an independent thinker. He of course opposed the war in Iraq, and he’s built a team of national-security advisers who disproportionately took the same, then-unpopular antiwar view. But as a presidential candidate articulating what he might do in office, his real break with convention may have begun with a gaffe.”

The gaffe he refers to is Senator Obama’s response to the question posed at the YouTube debate on July 23, 2007, about whether he would be willing to meet “without precondition … with the leaders of Iran, Syria, Venezuela, Cuba, and North Korea.” Yglesias contends that this response broke with the conventions of US foreign policy—both those of the Democratic and Republican parties, as well as those the Senator set himself.

But, as Yglesias sees it: “As the campaign stretched on and Clinton sharpened her attacks on Obama’s commander-in-chief credentials, he began to counter by questioning her whole approach to foreign policy—the establishment approach.

Today, Obama calls not only for direct negotiations with leaders of rogue states, but also for an American commitment to eventual global nuclear disarmament (in part to reinvigorate nonproliferation efforts); a substantial rebalancing of American military priorities toward Afghanistan (and away from Iraq); a softening of the embargo on Cuba; and a widening of the current, single-minded focus on democracy promotion to include other development goals that might more effectively prevent terrorist recruitment. Many think that there’s little difference between the Democrats on policy grounds. That may once have been true, but over time—and largely in response to Clinton’s barbs—Obama’s foreign-policy approach has evolved into something substantially different from either Clinton’s or McCain’s…”

I am with him up to here. Then he contends: “Mercifully, Obama’s foreign-policy approach is not characterized by “new ideas”—there are no genuinely new ideas about how to manage America’s place in the world. Nor does it involve any strained attempts to develop a theoretical worldview from which all conclusions must follow (if Obama wins in November, the thrilling debate over what should replace neoconservatism—”realistic Wilsonianism”? “ethical realism”?—can be tabled).

Instead, the crux of his approach is a certain fearlessness in asking questions, a refusal to dismiss any option as simply taboo. Why not talk to the leaders of Iran and Syria? If we want other countries to follow the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, why shouldn’t we be willing to live up to our own treaty commitments? If al-Qaeda is primarily in central Asia, how come America’s military and intelligence resources aren’t?”

True, there remain few new ideas on how to manage America’s place in the world that haven’t been thunk yet. But the courage to question the establishment thinking, and certainly during a Presidential campaign certainly is new. While Iglesias and others call it Obama’s “gaffe,” I think Obama’s “audacity” to question US foreign policy conventions has a lot to do with why so many Americans are choosing to vote for him.

Furthermore, while Obama’s ideas may not be new to the foreign policy discourse, there are many foreign policy ideas that an American leader has yet to implement. If we can trust that the new ideas he espouses are not mere campaign rhetoric—part of the “change” theme of his campaign—than I see there being nothing “accidental” about Senator Obama’s foreign policy.

Guardian columnist and veteran reporter Jonathan Steele pennedan opinion piece on Wednesday about how Barack Obama, unlike the other Presidential candidates understand the American image problem. 

Although it was published one day before President Bush’s veiled jab at Obama’s open approach to conducting diplomacy with enemies, the commentary unintentionally comes to the Senator’s defense:

“…The Republican nominee John McCain accuses Obama of not having national security “experience”, but what experiences do he or Hillary Clinton have which compare with Obama’s? They were raised in the usual American cocoon of believing that the values behind the country’s anti-colonial beginnings still guide its international behaviour. Obama, by contrast, knows the US has run a global empire for at least the past half a century. His mother taught him, he writes [in Dreams From My Father], “to disdain the blend of ignorance and arrogance that too often characterised Americans abroad”.

This awareness of how many people around the world see the US is the bedrock on which Obama’s approach to foreign policy is built. It is the opposite of the naive self-image of the US as a beacon on the hill. It explains his principled opposition to the Iraq war from its inception. It underpins his criticism of Clinton’s threat to “obliterate” Iran if it considered attacking Israel. As he put it: “We have had a foreign policy of bluster and sabre-rattling and tough talk, and in the meantime have made a series of strategic decisions that have actually strengthened Iran … It is important that we use language that sends a signal to the world community that we’re shifting from the sort of cowboy diplomacy, or lack of diplomacy, that we’ve seen out of George Bush … This kind of language is not helpful,” he concluded coolly.

This does not mean Obama is a friend of Iran’s President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. He calls him “reckless, irresponsible and inattentive” to the day-to-day needs of the Iranian people. He says the Iranian “regime is a threat to all of us”, and supports sanctions to prevent it getting nuclear weapons. But, unlike Clinton, he criticises Washington’s refusal to have direct talks with Iran, as well as Cuba.”

This does not mean Obama is a friend of Iran’s President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. He calls him “reckless, irresponsible and inattentive” to the day-to-day needs of the Iranian people. He says the Iranian “regime is a threat to all of us”, and supports sanctions to prevent it getting nuclear weapons. But, unlike Clinton, he criticises Washington’s refusal to have direct talks with Iran, as well as Cuba…”

In Steele’s conclusion he queries: “So the big questions remain: does Obama really want to change US foreign policy and can he, if he does? Having a black person in the Oval Office, and especially one with an understanding of US imperialism, would have a colossal international impact in itself. But would this merely result in even greater disappointment once the months go by and US policy stays the same? …I feel Obama is our best hope. In my mind I prepare for business as usual.”

Notably, Steele’s article was also published in the Tehran Times, a widely-read English-language daily newspaper based in Tehran.

Zogby International and the University of Maryland’s Shibley Telhami conducted a poll last month of 6 Arab publics: Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon, Morocco, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE.

Not surprisingly, the poll reveals negative attitudes toward the US. The pollsters also took this opportunity to gauge these publics’ opinion on the US Presidential election.

Reuters reports on these findings related to Arab opinion on the US Presidential election:

“Looking ahead to the next U.S. president, 18 percent of respondents believed Democratic contender Barack Obama had the best chance of advancing peace in the Middle East followed by 13 percent who saw Hillary Clinton as their best hope.

Only 4 percent chose Arizona Sen. John McCain, the presumptive Republican nominee for this November’s U.S. presidential election. The remainder either U.S. policy would stay the same whoever won or they were not following election.

One in three respondents believed U.S. policy would remain the same, no matter who won the U.S. election and 20 percent said they were not following the U.S. election anyway.”

Senator Obama has inspired yet two other musical cultivations, both coming from the Caribbean.

The Mighty Sparrow, a Caribbean-American of of Grenadian/Trinidadian origin known as the “Calypso King of the World,” composed a song praising Obama.

In the song, titled “Barack the Magnificent,” Sparrow sings: “Barack! Barack! He is fighting for openness and honest government. Barack – is doggedly defiant; phenomenal strength; and wisdom beyond comment.”

Sparrow’s lyrics also urge the Senator to stop the war in Iraq, end the genocide in Darfur, get healthcare for those who “have not,” and to “clean up Washington… in the wake of the Jack Abramoff scandal.”

According to Sparrow’s website, the singer actually endorsed Senator Obama back in August of 2007 at an “exclusive,” backstage meeting between the two at the Marriott Hotel in Brooklyn. At the meeting Sparrow presented the Senator with a mix tape he composed and recorded as a “tribute to Obama.”

Sparrow said of Obama: “Based on what I have heard, read and researched, I am very impressed by the resplendent vision of Obama (words which entered into his hit song). He is resilient and wise. It is easy to equate him to Solomon.”

One more musical tribute to Senator Obama was recently released by Jamaican Reggae singer Cocoa Tea:

PRI’s The World radio program investigated Carribeans’ views of the US Presidential election.  The program’s correspondent in Jamaica had some interesting insight and quotes from Carribeans themselves on whether Obama holds the promise Sparrow sings about.

Lisa Mullins of Public Radio International’s “The World” program spoke with Mohamad Manzarpour of the BBC’s Persian Service on Iran’s move to suspend talks about Iraq’s regional security.

Toward the end of the conversation Mullins asks Manzarpour about the Iranian public’s reaction to Senator Clinton’s recent remarks about what she would do as President if Iran were to attack Israel: “totally obliterate them.”

Manzarpour reports that there is a lot of interest in the primaries in Iran. He said Clinton’s remarks greatly effected Iranian public opinion: there is “immense worry and anxiety” among Iranians, no matter their political bent, that the next US President might attack Iran.