By John J. Metzler
UNITED NATIONS ― Sen. Barack Obama scored a historic victory in winning the presidency of the United States. Clearly the first African-American elected to the prestigious office, has put to rest fears of lingering racism and has taken his campaign motto of ``Yes we can'' to a meaning well beyond of America's shores.
The symbolism of hope, promise and breaking down barriers are the grist of the classic American dream. Yet, the giddy enthusiasm, which has reigned among Obama supporters both in the U.S. and abroad, very much evokes Jimmy Carter's own stardom in the election of 1976.
Now it remains the crisis of political expectations and the President's ability to deliver on promises, which confronts the new administration.
During this election, Obama's advantage beyond his mantra of ``Change'' rested in the Democratic Party's massively effective electoral ground game. John McCain, the old soldier, war hero and senator, was outnumbered, outtalked, outmaneuvered and outspent by a tsunami of political contributions.
As a backdrop the liberal mainstream media served as enthusiastic cheerleaders. The financial meltdown of September/October moreover sealed McCain's fate as the inheritor of the Republican Party mantle.
Obama is the first Democrat since Jimmy Carter to win more than 50 percent of the popular vote. Interestingly both of Bill Clinton's wins in 1992 and 1996, with far bigger Electoral College tallies than Obama, saw Clinton getting 43 and 49 percent. Obama's 51.6 percent of the popular vote rivaled George W. Bush's 50.7 percent in 2004.
The Obama ticket reached 349 electoral votes while John McCain won 162. The Republican rout in part rested with a poorly funded and unfocused campaign.
Obama's victory is an extraordinary achievement but not a mandate. Here's why. In 1980 Ronald Reagan unexpectedly beat Jimmy Carter with 50.8 percent of the popular vote but reaching 489 electoral votes to the Democrats 49.
In 1984, Reagan delivered an electoral tsunami with 58.8 percent of the vote and winning an almost dizzying 525 electoral votes to Mondale's 13.
And let us not forget that George Bush the elder in 1988 (despite a spiteful media campaign against him) still garnered 53.4 percent of the vote and won 426 electoral votes compared to Dukakis' 111.
But let's briefly return to the 1970s and Jimmy Carter. In many ways, the 2008 election presented a perfect storm of political bad circumstances. Back then the warm-up for Carter was the Republican rout in the 1974 Congressional elections and the backlash from the Watergate scandal.
The Republicans were badly battered by the youth vote in 1974 merely two years after Richard Nixon's 1972 landslide with 61 percent of the popular vote and 520 electoral college votes. Two years later the Nixon presidency was in a self-inflicted disgrace, Nixon resigned, and the decent but dull Gerry Ford was in the White House.
By the 1976 election, the stage was set for a new era of change where a peanut farmer who had served as Georgia governor was confronting the near hapless Republicans with a message of change, hope and a human rights based foreign policy.
Jimmy Carter won the White House with 50 percent of the vote and 297 electoral votes. Ironically while the Democrats dominated both houses of Congress, Carter's and likely Obama's biggest opposition may rest in the Capitol and inside his own party.
What followed of course were the Carter years, where the unbridled enthusiasm of an untested and inexperienced team was shattered on the rocks of reality. Soon Jimmy Carter's mismanaged and mediocre policies triggered a steep economic decline as America was saddled with 7.5 percent unemployment, 12 percent inflation, 20 percent interest rates.
On the global front, the U.S. was confronted by raw Soviet expansionism, oil boycotts, confusion in South Korea, and the rise of Islamic fundamentalism in Iran. Fundamentalist thugs seized our embassy in Teheran, a hostage crisis lasted over a year, and the effects of the collapse of Iran into an Islamic state haunt America to this day.
At the U.N., when Father Miguel D'Escoto, recently assumed the presidency of the General Assembly, it evoked the 1970s. Here was the former Foreign Minister of Nicaragua's Marxist Sandinista regime (which also seized power during the Carter years), who now, a generation later, has returned to the U.N. Full circle indeed.
Soon Barack Obama will govern a country where nearly half the electorate voted against him. Today America speaks of great expectations and the world revels in what Le Monde of France headlined, ``The Hope of a New International Era.'' We shall see what reality has in store for us.
John J. Metzler is a United Nations correspondent covering diplomatic and defense issues. He is author of ``Divided Dynamism _ The Diplomacy of Separated Nations; Germany, Korea, China'' (University Press, 2001). He can be reached at jjmcolumn@att.net