It isn’t Obama that’s the problem with Obamania. His stature may have advanced to the point he’s graduated to the über-celebrity ranks of those with one name, like Cher, Bono and Elvis. But he remains a mainstream US presidential candidate. He is only a chance vehicle riding a wave, a wave made possible moreover only by the depths of depravity to which America sunk during eight years of—is there a polite way to say this?—hosting a mental retard in the White House. The Obamania phenomenon says far more about the outgoing president, and about the American media and entertainment industries’ ability to create and pump popular frenzies, than it does about the young first term junior senator from Illinois with the gift of the gab.

He’s good, there’s no question. He’s qualified for the job certainly—who wouldn’t be compared to George Bush?—and his personal story is as compelling as Lincoln’s log cabin. He speaks well, his instincts seem well-guided and he looks the part, being more Tiger Woods black than Malcolm X black.

The troubling aspect of Obama isn’t him, it’s the mania around him. From a larger perspective, like perhaps from outside the country, it’s the peculiar habits of that national culture in which this mania is taking place that gives rise to worries the place is jumping from the fry pan only into the fire.

The mass emotional and single-minded rallying around a new national leader is a phenomenon peculiar to America. Were it not for the constant saturation of global media with US images and events it would all appear every bit as foreign and strange as it really is.

There is in this particular rallying around Obama a strong sub-text of redemption and deliverance, as though it were chiefly Americans who suffered most egregiously from the Bush administration. There are, however, two nations utterly ripped apart by the outgoing administration’s choices, and most of the rest of the world is left in fearful confusion. It may be difficult to remember that prior to Bush just eight years ago, the world felt largely at peace. After Bush, there are, in addition to two severely war-ravaged nations, three more confirmed nuclear-bomb equipped nations, two other superpowers in a state of rapid re-arming, a Kyoto Accord all but forgotten, a license for every powerful neighbour to march into any lesser nation, oil prices threatening the economies of the world and the well-being and day-to-day life of billions everywhere, and a grossly unbalanced global financial system weighted dangerously by massively and irresponsibly accumulated US debt.

These are all the results of choices made by American leadership serving in the name of American voters but causing extreme pain, suffering and distress for billions outside of America. Obama’s rallying cry is “change,” but the change promised is all directed at Americans. That would normally be fine except it blithely ignores the fact that what made Bush so terrible—so much a thing to change—was his administration’s effects on the rest of the world outside America. American’s may love Obama all they wish, but the rest of the world outside America might well ask where is the change?

Has Obama, for example, offered war reparation payments to Iraq? Or will Iraq, like Vietnam to this day, be made to pay reparation payments to America for the crime of being invaded and occupied? Obama famously voted against the war while in the Senate, meaning he acknowledges the illegality of the war. No reparations have been suggested, however.

On this issue, Obama has only spoken of getting US soldiers home. That’s a good idea and it would keep them from getting killed. But a little bit more must be offered to Iraq and the rest of the world than merely an attempt to pull out. We know the only real problem Americans have with this war is the deaths of US soldiers. Where is Obama’s promise to arrest Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Rice and Wolfowitz, and to hand the gang of five over to the International Criminal Court for war crimes trials? Where, for that matter, is Obama’s statement on US endorsement of the International Criminal Court?

Had US soldiers been killed at anything close to the rate at which the victims of their crime were killed—perhaps a million and a half in Iraq—no candidate could hope to win election without promising to hang to death the whole White House. The armaments companies were right: by developing killing technologies that keep US soldiers mostly out of harm’s way, even while actually killing way more innocent people far more indiscriminately, the American leadership can wage wars with unlimited impunity, free from concerns the US public might cave. Smart bombs indeed.

Has Obama mentioned the USA Patriot Act as something to repeal? Has he pointed out the arrests of independent media at the Republican National Convention made legal by that act? Has he promised to restore the wildly imbalanced power of the executive branch compared to the Congress? Has he spoken of dismantling the emperor presidency? Has he spoken of renewing laws to make eavesdropping and wiretapping illegal again? Has he promised to restore habeus corpus? Has he promised to speak at the UN to repudiate everything Bush said about the international body in those cavalier and sneering rebukes of its whole peace mission?

Americans may rally around the change Obama promises them, but there is scant reason for the rest of the world to embrace Obama because there isn’t much change on offer. One may recall that Lyndon Johnson ran in 1964 on a platform to get America out of Vietnam. His means of doing so came to involve the deployment of 500,000 troops. Nixon campaigned in 1968 on a platform to end the war, and his idea turned out to involve bombing Cambodia and Laos with more tonnage of TNT exchanged by both sides in the entire European theatre during all of World War II, and to seriously threaten, moreover, the nuclear bombardment of Hanoi and even Chinese cities at the Paris Talks.

Iraq presents logistical problems for anyone contemplating getting US forces out of the country. There is only one airport capable of handling the large troop and equipment planes, and it sits at the end of a road notoriously impossible to secure. The country is filled with grieving families angry at what US soldiers did to their loved ones. Furthermore, for almost six years now, an economy has evolved that is built around supplies to US bases and that which falls off US trucks. It won’t be a matter of the door being held open for a quick and orderly exit, not if it means the end of supply and service contracts big and small in a place where hardly any other part of the economy is working. Has Obama got a plan for the relocation of the hundreds of thousands of Iraqis who would be viewed as collaborators and killed the day the US leaves? No one in America seems to be concerned with exactly how Obama proposes to get the US out of Iraq, even though we all know that efforts to get the US out of Vietnam amounted to the worst of the atrocities visited by the US on that region, by a Democrat Party president with a plan. History is filled with tragic stories of nations failing not to get into other nations, but to get out of them.

Of course it is impossible for Obama to campaign on a promise to make reparation payments to Iraq and to arrest and hand over to the ICC the outgoing leaders. But it’s that very impossibility that is the key to understanding Obamania: there isn’t actually any change coming in America, aside from speeches delivered in full sentences. Another country with a leadership as irresponsible and misguided as the Bush administration wouldn’t elect anyone who wouldn’t promise to capture and hang those that led the nation into such a morass. Obama, on the other hand, promises only to legitimize the American system, to demonstrate that it works and works well, that it can self-correct, just as the administration of Jimmy Carter erased all thoughts in America about their system itself actually being a problem after the revelations of 1973.

All America has to do, the totality of the price it must pay for all its recent sins, is merely show up on election day and vote for a new guy, then all will be forgiven and forgotten, and it’s back to business as usual. Has Obama promised to dismantle the US military industrial complex? Has he proposed a new military built for defense only? Has he proposed to end the war on drugs? Has he proposed to investigate the events of 9-11? Has he promised to make the CIA accountable to Congress instead of solely to the president? Has he proposed to re-regulate the financial industry? Has he proposed converting the Federal Reserve into a state-owned and operated institution? Has he proposed a basket of international currencies to replace the US dollar as the sole reserve currency? Has he promised that oil be traded in currencies other than the US dollar? If not, of what value is he to anyone outside the US?

He has proposed no change in how America behaves among the family of nations. He has not spoken of the price to pay for US sins the last eight years. He has only offered to turn the page on it as though it were all just regrettable history, something he has promised the American people he will lead them out of by turning his back on it all and moving forward. But wait just one minute, you don’t get to just move on after doing what you did to the world!

The only thing on offer for the rest of the world, so caught up in the US media-generated frenzy around Obamania, is a temporary lull while the US re-arms to come back at the rest of the world on another day with renewed vigour, as surely as Reagan followed Carter just six years after Watergate and the iconic helicopter blades whirled impatiently atop the US embassy in Saigon.