LONDON - If history records a sudden surge in carbon emissions yesterday, it may be due to the collective exhalation of relief and joy by the hundreds of millions - perhaps billions - of people around the globe who watched, waited and prayed for Barack Obama to be elected president of the United States.
In country after country, elation at Obama's win was palpable, the hunger for a change of American leadership as strong outside the United States as in it. And there was wonderment that, in the world's most powerful democracy, a man with African roots and the middle name Hussein, an upstart fighter who took on political heavyweights, could go on to capture the highest office in the land.
Suddenly, Americans used to being criticized for speaking hyperbolically about their country found plenty of others doing it for them.
"The new world," the Times of London declared on its front page, beneath a smiling portrait of Obama.
"One giant leap for mankind," echoed the Sun.
From the beginning, this race has mesmerized observers far beyond American shores. Two wars and two terms under President Bush have left many around the world angry and spent.
Yet although many have denounced U.S. power and unilateralism, they also seemed intent on putting the country back on a pedestal as a source of admiration and aspiration, and they fixed on Obama as their hope. Polls consistently showed that, if the rest of the world could vote, the Illinois Democrat would win not just by a landslide, but an avalanche.
So as the results came tumbling in on their radios, TV screens and cellphones, many outside the U.S. saw it as their moment as much as America's, and Obama's victory as their own.
"A lot of people told me they had tears in their eyes last night. I was one of them," Randa Habib, a Jordanian writer and political analyst, said yesterday. "I saw his speech. I was very moved. This is a lesson to us all, that blacks and whites in America can have such a shameful past between them, yet they come together and learn how to live together." The Middle East, she said, has always wanted to look to the U.S. as a beacon, despite differences over the Arab-Israeli conflict, the Iraq war and other issues.
"There's a feeling of hope that things will be right in America," Habib said. "Obama can make you once again respect the U.S. for its values and democracy and all those things we had forgotten about over the last eight years."
