World to Seek a Refund on Hope and Change

Buyer's remorse. And it ain't even started yet:

In the weeks since Barack Obama and his family walked out on that Grant Park stage, our euphoria about the world's euphoria must surely count as the most endearingly silly outcome of this election.

News from overseas fed the excitement. The birthplace of Obama Père, Kenya, declared a national holiday. Western Europeans, the Chinese and Russians (the people if not their rulers), even that fabled Arab Street, all seemed to rejoice. So many of us have heard from family and friends overseas awed--as Bill Clinton once said--by the "mystery of American renewal." A black man, the son of a foreigner, a virtual unknown a mere four years ago, rose to the highest office on the planet. Only in America, they say, What a country! They mean it, and they're right.

Of course, Andrew Sullivan told us it would be so on the cover of last December's Atlantic--and subsequently told us, repeatedly, that he'd told us that "Obama matters" because the world will see us differently. He has plenty of company in the commentariat and among (admittedly) Democratic politicians. All together, they channel Gidget: "You like me, right now, you like me!" I imagine Sally Field (of 1985 Oscar ceremony fame) partakes fully in the Obama-as-America's-salvation-overseas mania, though I haven't bothered to ask.

One hates to spoil a good party, but here's a bet that's far safer these days than a U.S. Treasury bill: Even with Obama at the White House, they won't really like us any more than before.

It's not because America's not a special country, a City upon a Hill, from the Pilgrims to Obama, the Blagojevich couple and other American horrors notwithstanding. It's because it is. And as ever, our earnest assertion of our superior ontological uniqueness--not to mention its reality in and of itself--is exactly what always grated on the unfriendlies grouped together under the banner of anti-Americanism.

Let's consider the Parisian variety: Anti-Americanism dates back to the 19th century, though the word itself didn't enter the French language until the 1940s and the dictionary in 1968. No other nation's name gets coupled with "anti" in French. The phenomenon grew with intensity the bigger and stronger America became after World War II and the end of the Cold War, and the weaker France, a former proud power, became. For the French, and virtually everyone else, when anything goes wrong, most especially in their own house, the easy way is to blame Big Guy.

What's puzzling is that we care this much what these people think. Like a teenage girl at a new school, Americans desperately want to be liked. Last year, on the eve of the 3/11 train attacks anniversary, former Spanish Prime Minister José María Aznar told me that power makes America, the Rome of our times, a target of so much criticism. His message: It comes with the territory; get over it. The other day in London, the historian Andrew Roberts remarked, "We didn't give a toss what anyone thought when we ran the world."

Above all, the country exists as an idea, and remains, Fareed Zakariaesque attestations to our decline and the rise of a post-American monde to the contrary, as alluring (and galling) as ever. Barack Obama may offer that a "new dawn of American leadership is at hand." But he and his electoral success are products of a culture of near limitless possibility that was here from the founding of the Republic; something always envied and admired by others. For better and for worse, that won't change.