To the steady beat of countdown to the U.S. presidential elections on Nov.7, the world at large joined the American millions glued to the live telecast of emotions rising to fever pitch in the nominating conventions of the Democrat and Republican Parties the past two weeks.

The world is not voting, but it might as well be, given its passionate interest in the course and outcome of America’s Super Tuesday. And this is its mantra for America: Don’t blow this chance to make the right choice! It will impact on us all as your gut issues interlock with ours in the economy, the energy crisis, global warming, and winning the peace under threat from fundamentalist ambitions.

This is how Peter Hartcher puts it in Australia: “United States presidential campaigns are free entertainment that America gives the world ... But it is more than just a reality TV show...We know that the choice of president will influence the likelihood of the US making war… When America goes to war, so, historically, do we. ...”

Hartcher’s opinion belongs to a worldwide range drawn by America’s National Public Radio (NPR). There’s more in YouTube, with the French telescoping the issues; Indians diagnosing the American electoral dynamic from the filters of their maternal culture; the traditionally phlegmatic Germans joining the global chorus. There too is Libya’s Col. Muammar Ghadafi getting the basic facts wrong. And the Japanese, oh the Japanese, who have turned Barack Obama into a fad in a fad-prone society.

Here’s an eloquent summary of the moment from a thoughtful young non-American in Shanghai. “Ecotone,” the ecologists call a zone in the natural world where living species from separate geographical locations meet and blend into new combinations. In the planetary political ecotone, this variety of world citizen is already merging with the American activist variety called “Democrats Abroad,” giving the world a whole different view of their country than it has seen in the past eight years under George W. Bush, Dick Cheney and company.

Like A Tale of Two Cities

Like a contemporary “Tale of Two Cities,” Democrats Abroad was “born simultaneously in London and Paris in 1964, when Lyndon Johnson defeated Barry Goldwater …funds were raised and committees formed, (but) votes could not be cast because in 1964, U.S. citizens residing abroad did not have the right to an absentee ballot in most states.” Details in their website make fun reading, starting with that earlier pitched battle between change on the key of humanism and “more of the same” with the “Grand Old Party” of a hawkish Republican elite atop a military-industrial complex.

The new movement kept right on growing as civil rights were on the march at home and the Vietnam War marred the American image abroad. From “two small committees in London and Paris,” Democrats Abroad “spread throughout Europe, Asia, Africa and the Americas” in the Reagan, Bush I and all the in-between years until the global disaster spelled “W.”

By 1972, Democrats Abroad had successfully lobbied for nine non-voting delegates to the party’s National Convention. By 1976, they had gained the status of a full Democratic state committee with voting delegates to the convention. And by 1992, they had “switched from a worldwide primary system to a worldwide caucus system for selecting delegates to the convention.”

The stage was set for dramatic departure. By June of 2007, they “voted to kick-off the 2008 delegate selection process with a global primary, so that Democrats around the world could easily participate.” And a three-fourths majority would elect Barack Obama in the historic first global American primary on Feb.19, 2008.

“Yes, We Span”

Ask Georgia McCauley of Democrats Abroad, Philippines to explain that vote, and she’ll tell you: Both by choice and circumstance, they have grown in the experience of “learning to listen and respect” the other cultures they live in. In over a hundred countries, Americans who listen were agreed: Obama is our man.

Americans abroad number “anywhere from four to ten million,” says Georgia, adding a guesstimate of “several hundred thousand” in the Philippines. For all their global presence, it turns out that counting Americans abroad is like counting TNT Pinoys in America.

They’re waiting for the next US population census in 2010, she says. Meanwhile there’s much work to be done just getting voters to register and vote, then getting those votes counted – correctly, we must add. But there’s an additional layer of steps Americans abroad must take. The campaign reminds them to beat the deadline of Oct.1 for registering with their respective home states – a multi-step process made easy to accomplish online on http://www.votefromabroad.org/.

“In some elections, Americans abroad can make the difference,” says Georgia as Democrats Abroad preach the ABC’s of democracy in their candidate’s own style. Last Aug.24, led by an environmental economist at the ADB who also happens to be Georgia’s husband, David McCauley, Manila saw the “Yes, We Span" motorcade drive from the Rajah Sulayman Park in Malate to the foot of Quezon Bridge in Plaza Lawton.

This “Obama Bridge Project” is just Barack’s style, but it’s really the brainchild of an American expat with poetry in her soul – Meredith Wheeler, who began it from her home in rural France, because “bridges unite opposite sides and bring people together, as we feel Obama will do, not only in America, but across the world.”

They’ve already spanned the Pont Neuf in Paris, the Millennium Bridge in London, the Charles Bridge in Prague, the Ponte Vecchio in Florence, Italy, the Nelson Mandela Bridge in Johannesburg, South Africa, and bridges in Tokyo, Sydney, Bangkok, Vancouver and Buenos Aires, with more to come.

A Full Heart from Denver

Meanwhile, Georgia McCauley brings a full heart back to Manila from the Democratic convention in Denver. What will you be telling your grandkids about that moment? I asked. “Barack's acceptance speech, when he repeated the statement from his 2004 Convention speech: there are no blue states, no red states, only the United States of America. I had been there to hear him speak so movingly four years earlier, and when he spoke those words again I felt a strong sense of destiny about his becoming President …The dream was becoming a reality, with 80,000 people cheering and millions watching our country fulfill its promise,” she replied.

Tell me that promise again, I said. “That someone can make a difference even without power and money,” she said, adding, “Barack’s strength comes from his ideas and his judgment –that’s what makes him special. It really makes me laugh when they call him ‘privileged,’ and ‘elitist.’ He grew up with his grandparents, who lived in a two-bedroom, one-bathroom apartment for 40 years,” she chuckles from personal memory.

Like Barack Obama, Georgia too grew up in Hawaii. That was where she met and married David, an early campus friend of Barack’s mother, Ann, at the University of Hawaii. When David and Ann next found themselves both working for the Ford Foundation in Indonesia, Georgia McCauley and Ann Soetero too would become lifelong friends – all the way to Ann’s early death from ovarian cancer in 1995.

Besides the gratification of seeing the Democrats transcend personal egos to close ranks behind Obama, to the McCauleys belongs the thrill of seeing the Barry they knew as a boy taking new giant strides in the promise his mother had worked hard to nourish and challenge to full flight.

Says Georgia, “Ann would have been pleased to see that promoting equality and opportunity, which was the cause of her life, is also the cornerstone of her son's life, and to see that his dedication to these causes could guide all of us to a safer, fairer and more harmonious America and world.”

I vote for that.

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