Yes, We Did! (Election Notes from Abroad)

I left the United States eleven weeks before the presidential election.

Before McCain chose Sarah Palin as his running mate.

Before the economy really collapsed and the dollar plummeted.

Even before Joe the Plumber became a house-hold name.

I took a position teaching English in South Korea back when people were still speculating an Obama/Clinton ticket, and only half joking about a recession. I missed many of the exciting moments in the final weeks before the election, because without access to a television or internet, I couldn’t watch the final presidential debate, or Sarah Palin’s horrendous interview with Katie Couric, or even the SNL sketches that followed. Sure, I saw clips on YouTube several weeks later, hunched over my desk in my studio apartment in Pusan, but it wasn’t quite the same.

Four years ago, I trudged through the streets of Seattle on election day, reporting for The Stranger. I interviewed people at the polls, asked them how they were feeling and what factors were affecting their decision that day. This was 2004, and most of them talked about the war in Iraq, a need to bring soldiers home, four years being quite enough of George W. Bush.

This election day, I walked to work in the crisp autumn air, to my job at an English academy twenty minutes from my apartment. My co-workers and I read yesterday’s copy of the New York Times in the break room, quietly mulling over what we thought the results would be, trying to explain to the Canadian teachers about popular votes. And then it was off to class to explain transition words and summary writing. There was none of the excitement, the anticipation, of last election day. Just fifteen young Korean faces, waiting to see their score on Tuesday’s quiz.

Four years ago, I had gone to bed well after midnight, the results still unclear. I awoke Wednesday morning and frantically turned on my laptop, sucking in my breath as I read the headline – “Bush Re-Elected, Kerry Concedes” on the MSNBC website. This year, because Korea is 14 hours ahead of the East Coast, voting was just underway when I nodded off to sleep on November 4th, well after 3am. I jumped out of bed the following morning just before 11am, bright blue sky greeting me in just the same way it had four years earlier – it was too beautiful a day to be met with bad news, just as it had been then.

I thought they would have called it by the time I clicked on the the New York Times homepage, but although the blue block on Obama’s side was decidedly bigger, the final results were still not in.

It would be another few hours before I heard the good news, from a text message I received from another American teacher: “we win! obama 08!” I whooped in my empty studio, glancing out the window of my 18th floor apartment, half-expecting people to be dancing in the streets.

They weren’t, of course. I wore my “Obama For Yo Mama” shirt to work that day, under my serious black blazer. The handful of other teachers was also in good spirits, but there was none of the joyous celebrating I saw on my computer screen from the streets of Chicago, New York, Seattle. It was like waking up on Christmas morning alone in a hotel room in a foreign city with no friends. Kind of lonely and anti-climatic.

But although election day didn’t hold the same excitement abroad as it would have at home, the results of this election are huge for Americans living abroad, significant on an international level in a way they’ve never been before.

When I asked my elementary school students what they thought of the election results on Wednesday, they all shouted, “Good, Teacher! Obama good.”

“But why?” I asked them. “Why is Obama good?”

“Obama black man,” one of the boys said. “First black man president.”

“And why is that a good thing?” I asked again. “Why is a black man as president good?” I was hoping to get a more in-depth answer, about race and class and change. Instead, they all looked at me like I was stupid.

“Because,” said one of the girls, speaking slowly and in a way that implied I just didn’t get it. “First is always good.”

In many ways, their simple answer is exactly right. First black man IS good, obviously, but for reasons beyond a ten-year old’s idea that first = winner. The face we have painted as “American” in recent years has been that of a white, Protestant, wealthy older man – not really the face of America at all. And not a face that people across the world can relate to, or even understand. Maybe that’s the face of the guys running things, but it sure isn’t the face of the average American.

I think Obama’s image alone is powerful enough to start to change the way many across the globe view America – a country that has too often been associated with greed, war and destruction. People here seem to really like Barack Obama, and maybe that warms them to the rest of the country too. In my travels in previous years, from London to Malawi to Israel, the first thing I have been asked is always, “Do you like President Bush?” People constantly seemed curious as to how he got elected and who exactly voted for him.

“I don’t understand,” one man said to me, walking along a dirt road in northern Mozambique. “I always ask Americans if they voted for George Bush, and the answer is always no. How then did this man become your president?”

Tell me about it, I felt like replying. Many of us have wondered the same thing. The disconnect between George Bush and the rest of the country oftentimes felt gargantuan, a man who didn’t know gasoline was going to reach $4 a gallon until a reporter told him, who didn’t support a minimum wage increase until the 6th year of his presidency. But I do think we’re changing course now, and that Barack Obama is going to lead us in a new direction.

Yes, it was a great disappointment to miss such a historic day in America and not be able to partake in the festivities and celebrations. I wish I could have watched the results come in with family and friends, and danced in the streets with strangers when Obama’s victory was finally announced. But the affects of this election are going to be felt for years to come, and now, when I am traveling, I am so happy that I will finally be able to answer Yes, yes I do like President Obama very much. He is a great president.

Because I truly believe he will be.