Obama - the View from Australia

The inauguration of Barack Obama as President has gotten a lot of attention in Australia. He has been front-page news all week in all major Australian newspapers, long TV news coverage of his various pre-inaugural events (speeches, train rides, paint jobs). And Australian TV showed the inauguration (oath, speech, parts of the parade, highlights from inaugural balls, etc) live, at 4AM local time, and again rebroadcast much of it, including the speech, during the day for interested viewers.

Why? I see four reasons. First, Australians are generally interested in the US. I'm struck at how much many Australians know about American politics. And they paid a LOT of attention to the whole election season, beginning with McCain, Romney, Huckabee etc on the GOP side and Obama, Clinton, Edwards, and the rest for the Democrats.

Second, Australians (like many around the world, it seems) are captivated by the idea that a black person has been elected President of the United States. I have to tell you, over the past year I had many Australians (including one political scientist who told me he had been predicting American elections since the 1960s and had only been wrong once) tell me confidently that the Democrats would never nominate a black man, and (after he was officially selected), how the US would never elect a black man. I nodded politely, and occasionally tried to explain (as an American) how I did not agree.

I think Obama's election resonates here in part because of the whole very poor situation of Australia's indigenous people. And Obama, very popular with Australians of all political persuasions, is even MORE popular with Australia's Aborigines. I was at a public event where Obama's inaugural address was being played (on tape; I only wake up at 4AM for World Cup soccer games!), and was talking with one Aborigine, who was gathering paper copies of Obama's address to take back to her friends and family in "the desert", because she said he was a role model for them, too. By the way, in "the desert" there is no internet access, so hardcopies, ignored by the rest of us who just planned to download them, were valuable for her.

A third reason for the attention is recognition that there are a lot of big problems around right now, starting with the global financial crisis which is beginning to hit Australia (despite the fact that it's banks are sound and have essentially no subprime market), and Australians are anxious to see what the new Administration does.

Oh, and the fourth and final reason for the excitement about Obama is that, to put it bluntly, the outgoing President is extremely unpopular here.