Serge Schmemann of the NYT company is interviewed:

With Bush so disliked, I guess in the first instance, most people anticipated or at least hoped that a Democratic candidate would win?

Most people did anticipate that. But we should look at the Obama phenomenon. This stems, in part, from a sort of global love-hate view of America which I’m sure that you’ve found in your life abroad. America is a country blamed for everything. It is also a country that everybody looks up to. There is an ideal image of America that is very strong in Europe, an almost utopian America that everybody believes in and everybody has a favorite memory of in the past—some smiling GI saving someone in World War II or [President] Jack Kennedy, who was very popular here. This kind of idealism has focused on Barack Obama. Obama here is always “the black candidate”—he’s going to bring back this great era of pure America. The wiser editorials step back from that but the fascination of Obama as kind of a new face of America that everyone wants to believe in has been quite strong.

Does it resonate for instance in Paris in the suburbs, where the Algerians and people of color live?

Very strongly, very strongly. Not only among people of color but also among the rooted, so to speak, those Europeans who feel that America is once again doing something that we in Europe are still not capable of doing, even though France does have the son of an immigrant as president. They see that America is a country that is capable of electing an African-American, something that Europe still sees itself as incapable of doing. There is a sense that there is a certain hurdle being cleared here—a historic hurdle—which is very strong. Obama is on the cover of so many magazines that Der Spiegel actually wrote a cover story about that. The headline was “Messiah Complex,” about what Obama has come to represent in Germany especially and elsewhere as well.

Now, I doubt Europe will ever be capable of electing any American, African- or otherwise-, but I feel they’ve always been retrograde in this regard. And I’m not sure who Schmemann is representing here – presumably his journalism friends. But, regardless, some free goodwill would be nice.

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