Obama's worldwide family

The New York times today explains the significant of Obama's family being spread around the world: "Obama’s bridge-building instincts come from somewhere. They are rooted and proven. For an expectant and often alienated world, they are of central significance." Columnist Roger Cohen recounts an encounter in Kenye with Obama's half-sister Auma who said: "My daughter’s father is British. My mom’s brother is married to a Russian. I have a brother in China engaged to a Chinese woman." This adds to the familiar Obama story spanning Hawaii, Kenya and Indonesia. Cohen comments: "Never before have U.S. fortunes been so tied to the world’s. Americans see that. When your mortgage is packaged into some ingenious security that’s sold to a German bank before the scheme unravels and you lose your house, the globe looks smaller. With some 30 percent of the revenue of U.S. corporations coming from overseas, and the Chinese buying American debt, and more than seven million people naturalized in the past decade, it’s harder to separate America’s fate from that of others. Isolationism is not merely wrong, it’s impossible. If elected, Obama would be the first genuinely 21st-century leader. The China-Indonesia-Kenya-Britain-Hawaii web mirrors a world in flux."