Obama Abroad

We have a pair of interesting columns from Thomas Friedman and Anne Applebaum about the foreign reaction to Barack Obama as Democratic nominee. While Friedman is writing about Egypt and Applebaum about Europe, both of them get at something that I see in Mexico way too often: the chauvinism with which people question whether Obama can win, if America is too racist to elect a black man. I've always thought that the idea that Obama would revolutionize foreign relations simply by virtue of his face a little fantastical, but maybe that's because I was looking at it wrong; Obama won't affirm all of America's best images of itself in the minds of foreigners, but perhaps he can disprove a lot of the worst misconceptions about his nation.