Why the world wants Obama to win

[DainBramaged]

.People surveyed in 21 countries overwhelmingly favor President Obama over Mitt Romney. What's behind that landslide?
President Obama and Mitt Romney are locked in an incredibly tight race at home, but overseas, the vote isn't even close. A BBC World Service opinion poll found that residents of 21 foreign countries overwhelmingly support Obama, with an average of 50 percent hoping that he wins a second term and only 9 percent favoring Romney. France is Obama's biggest booster — 72 percent of respondents support him. The only country where Romney enjoyed greater support than Obama? Pakistan. So why are foreigners in the bag for Obama? Here, three theories:

1. Obama's foreign policy works
Overseas, the president has an undeniably strong record, says Jeffrey Simpson at Canada's Globe and Mail. Obama has shown he's capable of "mixing muscularity with restraint," extricating the U.S. from wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, avoiding direct intervention in Syria, and resisting "the push to recklessly attack Iran" — all while relentlessly going after terrorists and playing a limited but key role in forcing regime change in Libya. Meanwhile, the world sees Romney displaying "the hubris of the powerful and the ignorance of the uninformed," thumping his chest and scaring folks overseas.

SEE MORE: Forget foreign policy. This election is about the economy.

2. The world is associating Romney with Bush
In many ways, this isn't really a reflection on Romney, says Max Fisher at The Washington Post. In Pakistan, for example, people aren't embracing Romney so much as protesting Obama's drone program in areas near the Afghan border. And more broadly, Romney's overseas poll numbers "are consistent with [Sen. John] McCain's in 2008, suggesting the possibility that many foreign publics associate Republicans with George W. Bush, whose administration was deeply unpopular abroad."

3. Soaking the rich is popular overseas
The fact that France is more pro-Obama than anyone else says it all, says Matthew Balan at News Busters. France is a leftist nanny state, and socialist President Francois Hollande is trying to slap a 75 percent marginal income tax on people earning more than 1 million euros a year, a move the Heritage Foundation's Nile Gardiner called "economic suicide." Such proposals "line up nicely with the president's platform." No wonder he polls so well there.

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[LeftishBrit]

1. Well yes, and another reason is that Romney is clearly utterly stupid and puts his foot in his mouth

everywhere he goes.

When he visited England, he went out of his way to say we were not 'ready' for the Olympics; insulted Boris Johnson (and achieved the almost impossible feat of making Boris seem sensible in comparison!); forgot Ed Miliband's name and called him 'Mr Leader' and referred to the 'backside' of 10 Downing Street - in England at any rate, your backside is your bottom!

He's even more obviously thick and incapable of diplomacy than Bush.

As regards France being a 'leftist nanny state' - well, very nice too; and they've done better than some other countries in the economic crisis. And although Hollande is indeed a Socialist, it's perhaps worth noting that quite a lot of the left-wing nanny-state-ism was laid down and preserved under the moderate Conservative presidents Giscard and Chirac.