The World Speaks

Two interesting polls are out today. The first one is a poll by GlobeScan which says that the world wants Barack Obama to be President.

US Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama may be struggling to nudge ahead of his Republican rival in polls at home, but people across the world want him in the White House, a BBC poll said.

The margin in favour of Senator Obama ranged from 9 per cent in India to 82 per cent in Kenya, while an average of 49 per cent across the 22 countries preferred Senator Obama compared with 12 per cent preferring Senator McCain. Some four in 10 did not take a view.

"Large numbers of people around the world clearly like what Barack Obama represents," GlobeScan chairman Doug Miller said.

Quite frankly, I don't care at all about who the world wants us to pick. If the American people elected this guy as President, it would be our choice, and there's nothing the world can do about it.

Of course, I think it's over the top to say the whole world wants Obama when you take a look at how many people were polled:

A total of 23,531 people in Australia, Brazil, Canada, China, Egypt, France, Germany, India, Indonesia, Italy, Kenya, Lebanon, Mexico, Nigeria, Panama, the Philippines, Poland, Russia, Singapore, Turkey, the UAE, Britain and the United States were interviewed face-to-face or by telephone in July and August 2008 for the poll.

I doubt that 23,531 people out of 6.6 billion coming from 22 out of close to 200 nations worldwide can really be called an accurate depiction of the world's view.