How the world is reacting to Obama's reelection

9. Britain

Britain seemed to let out a collective sigh today:

Robin Niblett, director of the foreign affairs thinktank Chatham House, told Monitor reporter Ben Quinn that he believed that there would have been been genuine “relief” at Downing Street following Tuesday night’s result. 

“My impression is that the president and the prime minister do genuinely get along. They are both pragmatists, both figures who are not particularly emotional about their policies. It's a different relationship to others in the past and therefore this is safe result at a time when the UK has a lot of challenges,” he said. “Having to bed in relations with a new US administration at this moment is not what Cameron would need.”

Indeed, Prime Minister David Cameron told the BBC during a trip to the Middle East that he had a good relationship with Obama.

"I have really enjoyed working with he over the last few years and I look forward to working with him again over the next four years,” he said. 

A Guardian editorial lauded what it called US "good electoral judgment in difficult times:"  

His victory wasn't big. It wasn't pretty. It didn't break the mould. It certainly wasn't inspirational in the way that his win in 2008 was. In places it was wafer-thin. But it was a US presidential win all the same. And the win in 2012 matters just as much as the earlier win did in 2008. In difficult times, it is even, arguably, a greater political achievement. Mr Obama's win is good for Americans, good for America, and good for the world.

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Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

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