GroundTruth

HANOI – On my journey through Asia looking for talented correspondents who will make up our team at Global News Enterprises and meeting with government officials to establish and register our news bureaus, I took some time out this morning to watch the presidential debate. With an early morning cup of coffee, I watched the two candidates square off live on TV here in Hanoi, Vietnam.

Both candidates addressed the idea of how they will seek to restore America’s standing in the world. Eight years of a George W. Bush presidency, both candidates agree, has undeniably damaged the reputation of America in the world. And so in the fall of 2008, these questions seem to resonate across the debate and across the world as it watches this debate:

What does America mean to the world?

How do we present ourselves to the world?

And what does the world think of us?

Vietnam defined itself against America. It’s birth narrative as a modern nation came in resisting an American invasion. Ho Chi Minh ’s Vietnam defeated America through patience and persistence and an unrelenting belief that it could shake off a leviathan like America with its B-52s and its Agent Orange and its ground troops and its sense of destiny.

And so Hanoi is an interesting dateline from which to observe the first debates in the presidential election in the United States at a time when America is involved in yet another fateful struggle in a distant land. This time it is the hardscrabble deserts of Iraq rather than the jungles and rice paddies of Vietnam. But what the history of our involvement in Vietnam teaches us about Iraq hangs in the air over this election, particularly with the presence of Sen. John McCain as a candidate. The debate moderator Jim Lehrer even raised the question directly for McCain.

I spent some time today at a small memorial for McCain that stands on a promenade around the lake in the center of Hanoi where his fighter jet crashed as he carried out a bombing raid on a power plant in the major city of the north of Vietnam. The memorial is an abstract piece of art that pictures a US Airforce pilot suspended in a parachute and looking down at the wreckage of a plane.

All around this memorial was a modern city going about its business. There were families resting on a Saturday morning along side the lake, and young people playing fierce games of badminton and elderly couples practicing tai chi. A mighty river of motor scooters and bicycles flowed past with the sound of beeping horns and the low, grinding hum of traffic.

One young woman who works as a political reporter for a Vietnamese news agency had this take on the debate in a casual and background conversation I had with her: “There are many people in this country who like John McCain because he has a connection to this place. He knows the war here. He knows Vietnam. And he will be connected with us. But there are a lot of young people who think that it is Barack Obama who understands the world. They believe that Obama is the best leader to see that America needs to improve its image with the world. So a lot of young people are voting for him.”

Another young man who had just graduated with a degree in computer science from Hanoi Open University put Vietnam’s relationship with America in sharp focus. “We want to work with America and not for America… We see America on an equal level. I think Barack Obama understands this and I think he understands the world and how America figures in the world.”

Tomorrow I leave for Jakarta, Indonesia where Barack Obama lived and went to elementary school as a boy. I will arrive in the largest Muslim country in the world at the height of the festival celebrating the end of Ramadan. And it seems a wild — and fitting — coincidence that I am traveling from Vietnam where McCain has a deep connection to Indonesia where Obama has roots in his extraordinary American journey that goes from Kansas to Kenya through Hawaii and Indonesia and elsewhere.

I leave Vietnam having finalized a deal with a solid correspondent, Matthew Steinglass. I also completed the necessary meetings with officials from the Foreign Ministry to officially apply for a news bureau in Vietnam. Just like in China, we will be breaking new ground as the first international web-based news organization to open a bureau. While here, I also deepened our relationship with Mr. Tuan at Vietnamnet, the leading on-line news agency in Vietnam. We have vowed to work together in the future and he is planning on attending a pre-launch gathering we are holding in mid October for our board of advisers and our investors and a close circle of editors, reporters and writers who are connected to our mission. In Jakarta, I will continue signing up more correspondents and then push on to Delhi from there for the final leg of the trip.

The journey continues.