U.S. presidential elections have always been the targets of global attention but Tuesday's voting is far more so than others.
Most opinion polls predict the Democratic candidate, Sen. Barack Obama, will have a walkover ― if not a landslide ― on his Republican opponent, Sen. John McCain, to emerge as the first black president in the 232-year U.S. history.
If McCain wins the election, he will also make history by staging a most unlikely, 11th-hour upset to become the oldest American ever to win a first-term presidency.
Final results will be available by Wednesday afternoon Korean time, but if the election was held on a global scale, the probable winner would be even clearer ― the 47-year-old Democrat. The world has become far worse off in both security and economy during the eight-year reign of Republican President George W. Bush.
What a new U.S. president should do is also self-evident; going almost exactly the opposite way to his predecessor. President Bush and his neo-conservative aides sought foreign policy of conflicts rather than cooperation and resorted to show of forces instead of dialogue. Their neo-liberalistic, market-rectifies-itself economic policy has thrown not just America but the entire world into an unparalleled turmoil not seen in decades.
This presidential election and Obama's candidacy itself are significant in this regard, reflecting the shift in America's social trends toward greater respect of minority groups in terms of race, gender and ethnicity. The next U.S. president is advised to make America go back to its original state of ``melting pot,'' from its more recent transformation of a ``salad bowl.''
The same can be said of his foreign policy. Bush and neocons began war on terrorism in Iraq and Afghanistan, but failed to win in either, only deepening conflicts between the Christian and Islamic worlds and disrupting global stability further. It may be premature and overstretched but a long-term task of any future-minded U.S. president should be to come to terms with the Muslims except for die-hard terrorists, by being a little bit more objective and neutral in Israeli-Arab conflicts. Elected or not, Obama's middle name Hussein should no longer be an unjustifiable stigma for him.
In this part of the world, too, the incumbent U.S. administration also returned the situation to a state of eight years ago, only giving North Korea time to make several nuclear bombs. The new American leader should stop dividing this world into good and bad, but meet with even the ``axis of evil'' leaders, be they Kim Jong-il or Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, as Obama said he would.
To overcome the worldwide economic turmoil, the new leader ought to try to establish a new, fairer global economic system in cooperation with not just Europe, Japan and China but emerging economies, including Korea. Seeking national interests may be inevitable, but Washington should take the lead to prevent it from developing into a beggar-thy-neighbor policy on a global level.
Sen. Obama's pronounced philosophy of respecting the value and dignity of labor and his priority on well-being of workers and consumers over big businesses appear to be far more hopeful than Sen. McCain's rich-get-richer-poor-get-poorer neo-liberalistic economic policy.
For these reasons, we think Obama to be better leader to solve U.S. and global problems and hope he will win the election.