The 'Obama effect' falls flat in this trip

• Source: Global Times
• [21:13 November 24 2009]
• Comments

By Barry Cunningham

Perhaps China has seen enough of its own rock stars not to be bowled over by the Obama road show that bombed in Beijing.

Popular opinion polls gathered even before the US president left town showed that our hipster in the White House did not send China's youth into transports of delight.

Young people here were evenly divided in their approval ratings for the US leader who bills himself as "the first Pacific president,"based on his birth in Hawaii and early upbringing in Indonesia.

This was not quite the PR bonanza that White House stage managers had in mind when they booked Obama's "town hall"meeting with college students in Shanghai.

Awaiting Obama's appearance in Shanghai, the neatly dressed students sat as silent and still as statues in a temple.

Little did the White House know that the president's audience was hand-picked by their universities or that the student's questions had been scripted and rehearsed for four days. No mention was to be made of You Know Who – a certain exiled figure in an orange robe from China's far flung frontier.

The White House saw endless public relations possibilities in Obama's first trip to China, a land with more Internet users than the entire population of the US, not to mention 60 million bloggers.

Obama is the youthful embodiment of a New Media culture defined by Google, Renren, Twitter and iPhone applications.

In the US, college-age techno-geeks swoon over the idea of a president who listens to his own iPod playlist of rap lyrics, plays basketball and sends text messages to his subordinates over a Blackberry.

As Obama himself told the students in Shanghai, it was a digital army of young people who mobilized over the Internet to help get him elected over an aging candidate who admitted he didn't know how to send an e-mail.

So imagine the sinking feeling of Obama's advance team when CCTV pulled the plug on a live broadcast.

Team Obama was able to sneak in the only question that made news back in the US "generated by our own embassy website by one of the American press corps."

In fact, it was Ambassador Jon Huntsman asking about "the firewall"– short for "The Great Firewall,"the condescending term for China's 30,000 Web watchdogs.