Obama Who?

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While many people around the world seem obsessed with the U.S. presidential election, when FLYP took the temperature on the attitude to the American presidential election on the streets of Lahore, we found plenty of folks who could care less.
About half the people we approached were entirely uninterested in the U.S. elections. There are two reasons for this. First, a sense of fatalism prevails among many Pakistanis. Second, Pakistan’s own growing list of problems: food and power shortages, inflation, a collapsing stock market, terrorism and the conflict in the tribal regions for which many Pakistanis blame the U.S.
Rokshana Yusaf, a 25 year old college student in Lahore, summed it up this way: “It doesn’t make a difference to us what happens in the U.S. because we have so many problems here. We have load shedding [power outages] and water problems everyday. I try to study for my exams each night and I can’t because we have no electricity.” And Tariq Hussein, a 25 year old traffic cop who is struggling to make ends meet with a wife and two kids, told us that “it doesn’t make a difference who comes to power. They all have the same policies for third-world countries like Pakistan.”
These attitudes were reflected in Pew’s Global Attitude Survey. Only 10 percent of respondents held favorable views of Barack Obama. Low, but good compared to the 7 percent for Bush and 6 percent for McCain.