November 5, 2008

Everyone is writing a lot about the elections and I don't really have much original to say. As someone who has spent much of the Bush administration in foreign countries, however, I'd like to say that it is especially gratifying that we have elected someone who not only makes me really proud to be from the US (easily the first time a presidential election result has made me feel this way), but whose election has also elicited the respect and admiration of the people I encounter on a daily basis in Turkey, where I've spent more of my adult life than anywhere else.

In Turkey, people still love Bill Clinton. While he was rather unpopular with most of the people I knew here due to his unwillingness to help the Bosnian Muslims in the first couple of years of his first term, from 1994 onwards most of the people I met here had generally good things to say about him. As was the case almost everywhere outside the United States, nobody here really cared about the Monica Lewinsky scandal, thinking instead that Americans were insane for obsessing over the story.

Then, not long after the earthquake of August 17, 1999, which killed over 20,000 people in and around Istanbul, Clinton visited Turkey. Indeed, Clinton's visit came in the wake of a second earthquake which hit the region in the second week of November. During his visit, Clinton famously sat down for tea in the tent housing a Turkish family which had lost its home in the first earthquake. The visit had an incredible impact on Turkish public opinion, and a rendition of Clinton's tea drinking session ended up on the back of a special gold coin the Turkish treasury made to commemorate the visit. Clinton pledged a billion dollars to Turkey to help the country recover—quite a sum compared to the miserly aid packages the Bush administration has come up with in response to foreign disasters. People still tell me how much they like and respect the man.

I don't really feel like going into the details of what people have told me about George W. Bush over the years. It has been extremely negative, and often angry. And rightly so.

Things aren't going to change immediately under Obama, and probably they won't change as much as I'd like. I think we'll still stay in Iraq for too long, and I still cringe when I hear him prattle on about needing to stem 'Russian aggression.'

Nevertheless, I feel quite sure that I won't end up feeling disgraced by his actions, and even hopeful that he can make me proud.

And that is change I can believe in.