Citizen of the World

The images we saw this week of Senator Obama certainly were presidential. This should come as no surprise, since part of the intent of the trip was, as the pundits said repeatedly, to "burnish" the senator's "foreign policy credentials," and the campaign adroitly sought to capitalize on these benefits visually. Pictures speak louder than words, so Obama's trip certainly accomplished this goal. But for me it served as a reminder of something more basic: that we have in Barack Obama a presidential candidate who is comfortable in many parts of the world because he has seen them.

If you've read Obama's book Dreams from My Father, you know that Obama lived in Indonesia as a child and traveled to other parts of the world as a young adult. As college students, many of us in the Baby Boomer generation took to the road, backpack strapped on and thumbs up, to see the world. (Our children, it seems, are following suit in record numbers.) We traveled when and because we could, indulging diverse curiosities (intellectual or otherwise), and it seemed that the whole world was traveling with us. At the time, we didn't know or care to anticipate what benefits we might reap from our collective junior year abroad.

Even though the current resident of the White House shares our generational membership, he didn't share our generation's thirst for international travel. He didn't travel as a student, or much at all as an adult, either. In fact, I was shocked to learn, several years into his presidency, that George W. Bush had never been across the Atlantic until he was President.

In 1960 Marshall McLuhan coined the phrase "global village," and as any of us who've been abroad lately can attest, the global village has arrived. Given the realities of global geopolitics today, it should be a requirement on the resume of anyone seeking the highest office in the land that s/he understand the world from firsthand experience. Being the most powerful nation on earth and its most successful pluralistic society, we have an obligation to do this. Moreover, we now have much work to do, because America's reputation has been so badly tarnished in recent years. Let's hope the work begun during Barack Obama's trip during this campaign can be built upon, once he is elected president.