James Kirchik is hardly a lockstep liberal, but in this post, I think he does actually make a typical liberal mistake in typical liberal fashion. His conclusion is this:

A top concern for voters in November will be a candidate’s ability to raise American prestige. Rest assured that McCain will do just that.

Given its origins, the word prestige sounds like a perfect fit for McCain to me. That aside, I think Kirchik is wrong about most voters. Most Americans don’t care what people think in New York and San Francisco, for Pete’s sake, let alone in Paris and Berlin.

Or that’s not entirely true. As one commenter puts it (nonmilagno posting Apr 2, 2008 – 4:30 pm), “It’s not necessary that Europeans like us. However, it is important that they realise we have common interests.” What worries Americans is not our lack of “prestige” but that we can’t always rely on other Western countries to go to the mat for Western values. I think that if a presidential candidate convincingly demonstrated that he or she could get governments of other democracies to see why the WOT affects them, too, voters would care. But proportion of American voters who are hoping they’ll be able to hold their heads higher among their European and Latin American friends at brunch on Sundays is small and very geographically restricted.

Kirchik’s argument about whether people care about rebuilding our reputation abroad is wrong on its own terms, but so is his assessment of how our reputation got where it is:

The truth is that much of contemporary anti-Americanism is a manifestation of disgust with George W. Bush as an individual and will immediately dissipate as soon as a new president — Democrat or Republican — enters the Oval Office in 2009. Yet also keep in mind that a similar degree of anti-American sentiment is inherent and may take a generation to disappear. Yet also keep in mind that a similar degree of anti-American sentiment is inherent and may take a generation to disappear. French anti-Americanism, for instance, springs from economic inferiority and a lost empire, was flaunted as far back as 50 years ago when Charles de Gaulle was president and George W. Bush was but a little boy. Much of South America’s anti-Americanism stems from 19th century American imperialism, something that no American president will be able to change.

What the next president can do to reverse the popularity deficit is distinguish himself from the current administration’s most unpopular policies. On this score, McCain already has much to his credit. He has long stood out for his proactive stance on global warming, his opposition to coercive interrogation practices of terrorism suspects, and his support for closing the prison on Guantanamo Bay, all things which anger people and governments overseas.

Given the hedging in that first paragraph, it’s hard to pin down how much anti-Americanism Kirchik expects to disappear magically on Inauguration Day. What proportion is attributable to anti-Bush sentiment? I’d say less than he thinks. Europeans and Asians loved the Clintons–they were lawyers with prestigious educations who talked a lot of big-government theory, which made them easy to identify with for a lot of elites there. And yet there was still plenty of bitching about America. Too prosperous, too confident militarily, too confident culturally, too friendly with Israel. They might like to see us hobble our economy with some drastic policies to combat global warming and stuff, but I don’t think the basic attitude is likely to change soon, no matter who’s president.

So I don’t think Kirchik’s argument in favor of McCain washes. Virginia Postrel has an intriguing and more convincing analysis of Barack Obama’s glamour in The Atlantic:

Obama’s glamour gives him a powerful political advantage. But it also poses special problems for the candidate and, if he succeeds, for the country.

…

To rely on illusions is to risk disillusionment. If Obama the dream candidate becomes Obama the real president, he’ll be forced to pick sides, make compromises, and turn “hope” and “change” into policies some people like and some people don’t. Or, like the movie star governor of California, he might choose instead to preserve his glamour by letting others set the agenda. Either way, his face won’t make America’s worries disappear, and his cool, polite manner won’t eliminate political disagreements. Some of his supporters will feel disappointed, even betrayed. The result could be a backlash, heightened partisan conflict, and a failed presidency. George W. Bush ran as a uniter, and Jimmy Carter promised national renewal.

Anne Applebaum wrote a column on a somewhat related issue last year. The headline was “What Presidents Don’t Know,” and her point was that some learning on the job is inevitable. Wonkish expertise and a ten-point plan for everything are less important than a realistic sense of what the candidate is getting into:

In fact, there may be some sorts of experience that are actually detrimental to a potential president. I worry, for example, about Hillary Clinton’s much-vaunted travels as first lady: She came, she made carefully prepared speeches, she received polite applause. It won’t be like that if she’s president, and I hope she doesn’t think it will be.

…

Other kinds of foreign connections could prove useful. Even aside from his specific beliefs, John McCain happens to be particularly good at speaking to (and arguing with) foreign audiences: The director of a German foundation recently complained to me that the U.S. presidential campaign was spoiling his transatlantic conferences because it meant McCain couldn’t attend anymore. Meanwhile, Obama, with his African relatives and Indonesian childhood, would start his presidency riding an enormous wave of international goodwill. His differences from our current president — he’s young, black, with a more complicated background — would win him a lot of points in a lot of places, whether or not he knows the name of the Pakistani president (and whether or not he would bomb that country, as he recently seemed to imply he would).

I remember vividly when Ann Althouse linked Applebaum’s column. A lot of her commenters seemed to take the above passage as an out-and-out endorsement of Obama–which gave me pause, because I hadn’t. Applebaum seemed to me to be observing two things: that any new president will have expectations and a default way of reacting to new information, and that how other world leaders respond will be an important part of that new information. She appeared to be suggesting that Obama might be able to leverage his initial warm reception; Virginia says that his glamour won’t be enough to save him if he gets into trouble but that he may have a realistic sense of its limits.

That one was probably bigger somewhere, but it was big enough here. We should know in a few minutes.