You Like Us! But Not For Long

In the weeks since Barack Obama and his family walked out on that Grant Park stage, our euphoria about the world's euphoria must surely count as the most endearingly silly outcome of this election.

It started the moment the election was called. Looking flushed, Charlie Rose turned for proof of our assured global redemption after the horrors of the Bush years to that grande French talking tête, Bernard-Henri Lévy. The Parisian in the open white dress shirt, made to order casual from London without half the buttons sewn on, loved right back

News from overseas fed the excitement. The birthplace of Obama Père, Kenya, declared a national holiday. Western Europeans, the Chinese and Russians (the people if not their rulers), even that fabled Arab Street, all seemed to rejoice. So many of us have heard from family and friends overseas awed--as Bill Clinton once said--by the "mystery of American renewal." A black man, the son of a foreigner, a virtual unknown a mere four years ago, rose to the highest office on the planet. Only in America, they say, What a country! They mean it, and they're right.

Of course, Andrew Sullivan told us it would be so on the cover of last December's Atlantic--and subsequently told us, repeatedly, that he'd told us that "Obama matters" because the world will see us differently. He has plenty of company in the commentariat and among (admittedly) Democratic politicians. All together, they channel Gidget: "You like me, right now, you like me!" I imagine Sally Field (of 1985 Oscar ceremony fame) partakes fully in the Obama-as-America's-salvation-overseas mania, though I haven't bothered to ask.

One hates to spoil a good party, but here's a bet that's far safer these days than a U.S. Treasury bill: Even with Obama at the White House, they won't really like us any more than before.

It's not because America's not a special country, a City upon a Hill, from the Pilgrims to Obama, the Blagojevich couple and other American horrors notwithstanding. It's because it is. And as ever, our earnest assertion of our superior ontological uniqueness--not to mention its reality in and of itself--is exactly what always grated on the unfriendlies grouped together under the banner of anti-Americanism.

The past few years for sure were especially happy ones for the flag burners, intellectual bomb throwers and suicide attackers. George W. Bush gave this crowd a great excuse to hate America--and the Democrats a highly effective partisan political weapon against the ruling party.