Over at FP Passport, Lucy Moore wrote yesterday of the Obama/Clinton race:
Identity politics distracts from the issues, but there's a reason. Identity matters-maybe not in terms of legislation or policy, but certainly in terms of image. And image can go a long way, especially when you're the leader of the free world and your face is on every television around the globe, 24 hours a day.
This is an argument you'll see a lot in the lefty blogosphere--especially with regards to Obama. It goes something like this:
The very moment [Obama] appears on the world's television screens, victorious and smiling, America's image and soft power would experience something like a Copernican revolution.
It used to be that liberals would say the rest of the world hated us because of our policies and conservatives would say they hated us because our freedoms. Perhaps both views were too complex. Apparently they hate us because we look different.