Monday, February 25, 2008

Obama-mania Rages in Mexico While Change is Unlikely

By Patrick Corcoran

Obama-mania, like any other infection, respects no borders. After first popping up in Illinois in 2004, it has steadily crept around the globe. Now that Barack Obama is the presumptive Democratic nominee, and has a better-than-even shot of making it into the White House, the bug is approaching epidemic proportions.

The response in Mexico to the American wunderkind, at least among the punditry, has been nearly as favorable as that in the United States, if a bit more remote. In the early part of 2007, Obama became the first of the presidential candidates that I saw grace a magazine cover this election season. (Ironically enough, given Obama’s reputation for lack of substance, that magazine was Life and Style.) The editorial pages of newspapers across the political spectrum teem with enamored commentators writing beneath headlines like “The Obama phenomenon” and “A man with charisma.”

The affinity for Obama in Mexico is in some ways perplexing. If your frustration with the United States lies in its quasi-imperial hegemony (as is the case with a lot of Mexicans), then Obama has little to offer because he’s not going to alter the United States’ role at the forefront of the world.

Furthermore, Obama’s much-heralded worldliness doesn’t include any time in Latin America. With all the other headaches out there, there’s absolutely no reason to think that President Obama’s priorities would be any more focused on the region than those of past presidents. And when it does land on his radar screen, it may not always be a good thing: his campaign rhetoric indicates that he would take a harsher view toward trade relations with Latin America than any president has in decades.

One arena in which Obama will almost certainly be in closer concert with Latin America’s prevailing opinions is with immigration, but the practical value of this is up for debate. It’s unlikely that Obama will pursue any comprehensive solution in a first term. Among domestic issues, health care has played the larger role in his campaign, there’s no guarantee that Obama could get an immigration accord passed, and the near-miss immigration legislation last year burned almost everyone involved. That doesn’t make for a favorable environment. Unless the political climate changes dramatically in the next few months, a reasonable immigration solution is going to be too easy to demonize, too much of a risk.  

Nevertheless, the enthusiasm persists.

The biggest reason for this is the most obvious: the charismatically brainy Obama appeals to the sorts of people who pay a lot of attention to politics, whether they live in Topeka or Tampico. The Mexican punditry’s affection for Obama mimics his relationship with the American chattering class.

Obama gets a lot of love simply by virtue of his party. A Republican president, even open-minded John McCain, will have his hands tied by the immigration hawks in his party. Eight more years of Republican leadership could well leave behind a wall across a large portion of the southern border, a several-hundred-mile, multi-billion-dollar middle finger to our neighbors.

Obama also scores points for the mere fact that he is not George W. Bush. Even if, as indicated above, no president can radically alter the United States’ posture, at the very least the next chief could be a lot more polite about it. Obama’s fundamentally conservative temperament ensures that Iraq-style adventurism will be on hiatus in the White House. And although he has no executive experience, it’s nearly impossible to imagine an Obama administration being less competent than its predecessor.

Another factor behind the enthusiasm is that most Latin Americans, though leery of its foreign policy and well aware of its interventionist history, have a generally positive attitude toward the United States. Any American who’s lived here in the last few years has heard some version of, “I really like Americans and America, I just hate the government,” about three billion times. Obama, with his campaign based on optimism, offers the promise of a government as well liked as the people who elected it. That ample supply of charisma and likeability have transfixed the local press, even if an Obama presidency wouldn’t bring about any real change in the United States’ relationship with Latin America.

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Patrick Corcoran, a MexiData.info columnist, is a writer who resides in Torreón, Coahuila.