Amr Awadallah Blog

First, congratulations to the US and the world for Obama becoming the 44th president of the USA.

A few months back an Egyptian columnist, Ibrahim Eissa, wrote a hilarious column depicting a hypothetical scenario in which Hussein Obama stopped by Cairo before going to the US. In that scenario he married an Egyptian girl and she delivered Mabrook Obama, but after two years he traveled to the US and left his wife and Mabrook Obama behind. In the states he married an American girl, then got blessed with Barack Obama. The column continues to follow the lives of the Egyptian born son, Mabrook, versus the US born son, Barack.

Of course by now you can see where this is going, the US son went on to take the seat of the most important position in the world, but the Egyptian son didn’t even get a toilet seat :). In fact, no body in Egypt, black or white, can dare to dream to get the seat of the president. And that, my friends, is why the US is the envy of the world, it is truly the land of dreams, the land where you are measured by how talented you are, versus your “nepotistic” connections, the amount of your “bribes”, or your race/religion/ethnicity/sex, etc.

That said, I do dream of the day that Egyptian democracy catches up to the US, after all, I do love Egypt, it is my motherland.

Cheers,

— amr

PS: I had to write that last sentence to be allowed to visit 🙂

Following up on my previous post regarding Facebook lexicon predicting an Obama win, the mentions for Obama in Twitter also extremely outrank McCain (this comes from a service called Twist which monitors Twitter mentions):

Go Obama 🙂

— amr

The Facebook Lexicon is a very nifty tool which analyzes the frequency and associations of words in Facebook wall messages for profiles, events, and groups. The first graph below shows that Obama is mentioned significantly more frequently than Mccain, and, more importantly, the second graph shows that the mentions for Obama have more positive sentiment (e.g. “I love Obama”), versus negative sentiment (e.g. “I hate McCain”).

Figure 1: Mention frequency for Obama vs McCain on Facebook walls



Figure 2: Mention sentiment for Obama vs McCain on Facebook walls. A 70% score means that 70% of the mentions had a positive sentiment and 30% had a negative sentiment.
I am not eligible to vote this year since I procrastinated in applying for citizenship (I am due to apply this year since I had the Green Card for more than five years now). That said, if I was eligible to vote, I would vote for Obama, and the reason would be this video from Colin Powell:



Frankly, the US made a mistake by electing Bush for president in 2000, but re-electing him in 2004 was like giving the finger to the rest of the world. Electing Obama shows that the US is (1) sorry for re-electing Bush, and (2) getting over racial/religious/ethnic intolerance, these two factors would open the door for the world to accept the US back as an unbiased super power. Last, but not least, Obama just comes across as smart guy, and we didn’t have an intelligent US president for some time now 😉

Cheers,

— amr