The Pew survey data suggests that this is only partially true. For example, in Pakistan, 13% of the public expresses confidence in Obama, vs. 5% for the American president when Bush was in office. Assuming that the election of Obama is the cause of the shift, that means that a change in management more than doubled the number of Pakistanis who express confidence in the American president.

Now, I take your point that the numbers for both presidents are low. Actions do matter more than style. But it hardly seems a stretch to posit that changing the name of “French fries” to “freedom fries” lowered America’s favorability ratings. After all, that was the point of that juvenile exercise.

I would add that Loconte’s bizarre call for a new polling suggests he does not know what polling is actually for. (or just doesn’t care) The objective purpose of a poll is to measure public attitudes about a select topic. Whatever one thinks about the results is an entirely different question. If Laconte wants to explain negative polling data gathered in the Middle East with the usual boilerplate about cultural pathologies, systemic ignorance, and regime propaganda, then he is more than free to do so, but he is not free to invent some new and ideologically more palatable type of polling. This is seriously evil stuff, no different from the Afrocentric backlash against “white science”. Loconte is deliberately seeking to vulgarize the metrics of analysis so as to make his support for democratist interventions unfalsifiable: If the polls show public support for American policy, they are valid; if they don’t, they are corrupted. This gives us a remarkably clear, albeit horrifically chilling, image of ideology-in-action: the attempt to make falsification impossible.

Then again, I can see this becoming more popular. Call it neo-con polling. The basic formula is as follows

X + 100%

X= Percentage of foreign public which supports American global leadership.

“125% of Iraqis support us!”

“We should also remember that nations have divergent interests.” That this even needs to be said is sad. Any chance that paleos, realists, and peaceniks can push back on the seemingly inevitable deployment of more soldiers to Afghanistan? Whither non-interventionism?

You looking for a teaching gig, or is punditry your path for now?