A a[euro]Cinnamon-Skinneda[euro][TM] President.(World View)

To much of the world, Obama is not black but dark-skinned, like anyone of the poorer two thirds of the planet.

The news about Hillary Clintonas collapse in the U.S. Democratic Party primaries was premature, to put it mildly. And Barack Obamaas apparent coronation will also have to wait a while, a few weeks or even a few years. But the Illinois senatoras impressive showing in the Iowa caucuses, in the New Hampshire primary and, perhaps more important, in his two national television speeches after the results came in, have started to force people to examine the implications, both within the United States and abroad, of an Obama White House. Speculation is rife everywhere about what his victory would meanaand rightly so.

The first question is whether his presidency would augur any significant change in policy with a meaningful impact abroad. The answer is probably not. On both domestic and foreign policy, the Democratic candidatesa stances are largely similar. Any Democratic president will try to extricate the United States from the mess in Iraq, yet all would face rigid constraints, and perhaps more important, Obamaas foreign-policy advisers (such as Anthony Lake) and Clintonas (Madeleine Albright and Richard Holbrooke) and their common friends (Bill Richardson), all spring from the same stem: the Bill Clinton administration.

Yet there is still an enormous amount of excitement abroad about the prospect of an Obama victory. Why? Symbolism plays a big role. While a Hillary Clinton presidency would mean that for the first time a woman would hold the worldas amachoa job par excellence, an Obama presidency would go much further. For starters, as many analysts have argued, his background is enormously appealing to the rest of the world. His father was Kenyan, not American. He was brought up partly in Indonesia. He is familiar with the Muslim religion and culture, and would probably understand the world better than others because he has spent time outside the continental United States since the day he was born.

But the main difference an Obama presidency would make is his race, which today trumps gender in most of the world, as far as symbolism goes. For the first time, the United States would have a chief of state who looks like what most of the earthas inhabitants believe they look like. By American standards, Obama is black; through the prism of the peoples of what used to be known as the Third World, he is simply dark-skinned. He looks like one of the billions of dwellers of the poorer two thirds of the planet. For the first time, the leader of the aothersa would look like aus.a For the first time, the first impression would be a ...