"Good evening, this is Katie Couric. I'll be anchoring our Decision 2008 coverage tonight, as the world elects the next President of the United States. The polls closed just minutes ago in Pakistan but we're already able to declare Barack Obama the runaway winner in the Islamabad Capital Territory, and he seems poised to pull off a clean sweep of all Pakistan's provinces."

OK, not even the New York Times is proposing -- yet -- giving the vote to everyone in the world. But for whatever reason, the Times's Roger Cohen apparently thinks the best thing he can say about Barack Obama is that -- given the chance -- he's the candidate that most people around the world, including Pakistanis, would put in the White House.

This is all in keeping with the Dem/MSM predilection to emphasize shoring up America's allegedly tarnished image in the world over fighting the war on terrorism [Dennis Prager has recently pointed out that the issue of fighting Islamist terrorism has been absent from the Dem debates].

Cohen argues in his Times column of today that no candidate is better positioned to accomplish that task than Obama, since he is the person the world would vote for, if only we were weren't hung up on that citizenship-requirement thing.

Excerpts [emphasis added]:

• President Bush has reminded [the world that] it’s hard to get out of the way of U.S. power. The wielding of it, as in Iraq, has whirlwind effects. The withholding of it, as on the environment, has a huge impact. No wonder the view is increasingly heard that everyone merits a ballot on Nov. 4, 2008.
• Renewal is about policy; it’s also about symbolism. Which brings us to Barack Hussein Obama, the Democratic candidate with a Kenyan father, a Kansan mother, an Indonesian stepfather, a childhood in Hawaii and Indonesia and impressionable experience of the Muslim world. If the globe can’t vote next November, it can find itself in Obama.
• Michael Ignatieff, the deputy leader of Canada’s opposition Liberal Party, said: “Outsiders know it’s your choice. Still, they are following this election with passionate interest. And it’s clear Barack Obama would be the first globalized American leader, the first leader in whom internationalism would not be a credo, it would be in his veins.”
• From promient Mexican Jorge Castenada -- “My sense is the symbolism in Mexico of a dark-skinned American president would be enormous. We’ve got female leaders now in Latin America — in Chile, in Argentina. But the idea of a U.S. leader who looks the way the world looks as seen from Mexico is revolutionary.”
• Andrew Sullivan, in a fine piece in The Atlantic, imagines a Pakistani Muslim seeing on television a man “who attended a majority-Muslim school” and is “now the alleged enemy.” He notes: “If you wanted the crudest but most effective weapon against the demonization of America that fuels Islamist ideology, Obama’s face gets close.”
• I see nobody else [but Obama] who would represent such a Kennedy-like restorative charge at a time when America often seems out of sync with the world.

I wonder where in America -- other than at the Times and the DNC -- "the view is increasingly heard that everyone merits a ballot on Nov. 4, 2008," as Cohen claims?

Cohen's argument is for peace through ingratiation, not strength. The Democrats are welcome to run on that in '08.

Suggested campaign slogan: "Vote Obama: Pakistani Muslims Would!"

—Mark Finkelstein is a NewsBusters contributing editor and host of Right Angle. Contact him at mark@gunhill.net.