TOKYO -- No sooner had Bernard Kouchner, the most pro-American French foreign minister in memory, concluded that the "magic is gone" for America in the world than Obamamania swept Europe after the lanky pol with big ears seized the Democratic nomination for president.
The foreign policy director of the German Marshall Fund, John K. Glenn, enthused that Barack Obama "reaffirms in European minds the vitality of the U.S." "Thanks to Obama," French analyst Dominqiue Moisi gushed, "America has returned to be the emotional center center of gravity of the world." Famously, even some Hamas leaders have applauded Obama.
Yet Obamamania was scarcely to be found on recent visits to Asia, including Japan, China and South Korea. Of course there are many who look forward to George W. Bush leaving office, and there are certainly supporters of Obama, especially in Indonesia where he partly grew up. But the wild enthusiasm just isn't there.
The official Chinese Communist Party paper, the People's Daily even tried to knock down the whole Obama phenomenon by arguing it meant nothing about the state of racial justice in America, but was rather "only" a matter of successful assimilation of a black man who had given up his identity by going to Harvard. Apparently China's authorities still miss the whole point of America -- a racially-hybrid cosmopolitan culture that, under the rule of law, can work for all individuals.
No doubt the absence of Obamamania across the Pacific has much to do with the fact that Asia's modernizing elites are more attentive to interests than values. They see in Obama, as well as any Democrat, the specter of protectionism. For them, Republican rule has been favorable to the free trade and globalization which has elevated them to ever greater prosperity.
Such a point of view is not only shortsighted, but historically wrong.
In the first place, Bill Clinton largely transformed the Democratic Party away from its fear of trade. He shepherded NAFTA through Congress and laid the groundwork for China's entry into the World Trade Organization. Long before Clinton, John F. Kennedy liberalized trade in the so-called "Kennedy Round."
Second, it is precisely the Democratic focus on universal health care, reliable pensions, the reduction of college costs and housing foreclosure rescues that promises to relieve the middle class anxieties that would sink globalization. The great economic lesson of our time is that an effective national safety net and public investment, especially in educating a highly skilled population, is the precondition for benefitting from global free trade.
The paradox, as the successful Scandinavian model has illustrated, is that social security enables flexibility and openness to change, not undermines it. The counterintuitive reality is that a simple anti-tax, anti-government, free enterprise agenda will bring globalization down, not sustain it.
As Bob Reich, the former US labor secretary has pointed out, historically the backlashes against globalization occur not under Democrats but under Republicans, as they did under Herbert Hoover and now George W. Bush. That is because America's huge middle class doesn't do as well under Republicans. "Because their jobs and incomes are threatened -- the median wage, adjusted for inflation, is lower than it was when Bush came to office -- they fear trade and other global commitments," says Reich.
The reality is that globalization inexorably creates losers as well as winners. For America to remain the land of opportunity where all comers can join the vast, prosperous middle class that buys up what the rest of the world produces, it will need what the Democrats today proscribe.
For this reason, Asia would benefit from a little Obamamania. In the end, the rise of a global middle class, particularly in India and China, is not sustainable if it means the demotion of the American middle class. Until the emerging economies reach a level of prosperity in which their own consumers are rich enough to buy most of what they produce -- the holy grail of decoupling -- their prospects are still linked to the fortunes of the American consumer.