I believe Mr. Zakaria is echoing what Anthropologists have been saying for years. The ability to travel cultural distances can lead to more substantive and accurate views of the world. Obama's complex identity and personal biography make him a compelling candidate not only because of his international experiences as a youth, but because he emobodies many aspects of American identity. He is bi-racial, grew up poor yet attended elite institutions for his formal education. Thus, Barack Obama, in a sense, fits in everywhere and nowhere at the same time. His unique identity politics compell him to be a uniter. This is not simply rhetoric but comes from a desire to see the world through different prisms as Mr. Zakaria puts it.
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Fareed Zakaria
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The Power of Personality
When I talk to people in a foreign country, no matter how strange, they are always familiar to me.
From the magazine issue dated Dec 24, 2007
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I never thought I'd be in this position. There's a debate taking place about what matters most when making judgments about foreign policy—experience and expertise on the one hand, or personal identity on the other. And I find myself coming down on the side of identity.
Throughout the campaign, Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton have been squabbling over who has the better qualifications to lead the world's only superpower.
Hillary's case is obvious and perfectly defensible. She's been involved in foreign policy for eight years in the White House (though in a sideways fashion as First Lady) and then seven years as a senator. Most of the Democratic Party's blue-chip foreign-policy advisers support her. Plus, she has Bill.
Obama's argument is about more than identity. He was intelligent and prescient about the costs of the Iraq War. But he says that his judgment was formed by his experience as a boy with a Kenyan father—and later an Indonesian stepfather—who spent four years growing up in Indonesia, and who lived in the multicultural swirl of Hawaii.
I never thought I'd agree with Obama. I've spent my life acquiring formal expertise on foreign policy. I've got fancy degrees, have run research projects, taught in colleges and graduate schools, edited a foreign-affairs journal, advised politicians and businessmen, written columns and cover stories, and traveled hundreds of thousands of miles all over the world. I've never thought of my identity as any kind of qualification. I've never written an article that contains the phrase "As an Indian-American ..." or "As a person of color ..."
But when I think about what is truly distinctive about the way I look at the world, about the advantage that I may have over others in understanding foreign affairs, it is that I know what it means not to be an American. I know intimately the attraction, the repulsion, the hopes, the disappointments that the other 95 percent of humanity feels when thinking about this country. I know it because for a good part of my life, I wasn't an American. I was the outsider, growing up 8,000 miles away from the centers of power, being shaped by forces over which my country had no control.
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