April 19, 2009
REPORTER'S NOTEBOOKWarming Relationships in a Warm Locale By SHERYL GAY STOLBERG
PORT OF SPAIN, Trinidad and Tobago — President Obama, seeking to warm up relations with Latin America as he meets many of the region’s leaders for the first time, spent Saturday here playing down his celebrity and casting himself as the new kid on the block.
“I have much to learn,” Mr. Obama declared.
It was the first full day of the Summit of the Americas on this lush and mountainous Caribbean island. With 33 other Western Hemisphere leaders and thousands of delegates and a raucous press corps squeezed into a Hyatt Regency hotel, Mr. Obama found it tough to keep a low profile.
Everybody seemed to want a piece of him.
The president was mobbed during the opening plenary session by delegates elbowing their way toward him for photographs — among them Ruben Blades, the Panamanian singer and actor, who accompanied Panama’s foreign minister to the session.
Later, as the leaders gathered for their official “family photograph,” Prime Minister Stephenson King of St. Lucia produced a copy of Mr. Obama’s memoir, “Dreams From My Father,” and asked the president for his autograph. Mr. Obama asked someone the date — he wanted to record it with his signature — and obliged.
Climate change, security and the global economic crisis, which especially threatens some of the impoverished nations represented here, were high on the official agenda. The discussion was so lively, said Robert Gibbs, the White House press secretary, that at one point Prime Minister Patrick Manning of Trinidad and Tobago lamented that all of the leaders had overrun their allotted time.
All, that is, except the newest one: Mr. Obama.
Canadian’s PerspectiveIt’s tough to be from Canada at the Summit of the Americas. With fiery Latin American leftists like Presidents Daniel Ortega of Nicaragua and Hugo Chávez of Venezuela dominating the stage, nobody here is paying much attention to the buttoned-down folks from the land up north.
Prime Minister Stephen Harper tried to correct that on Saturday.
First, he appeared before the cameras walking alongside a certain other leader from North America, a possible political plus for him in Canada, where Mr. Obama is popular. Later, in a brief interview, the prime minister offered his observations on the summit meeting.
The talk turned, not surprisingly, to you-know-who.
“Look, in Canada, we’re used to the American president being the celebrity,” Mr. Harper said, professing not to mind being in Mr. Obama’s shadow.
He went on, “What’s interesting is that his desire, his clear desire to listen — not necessarily to agree but to listen — has won him a lot of friends.”
It has been striking to see Mr. Obama mingle with the multicultural array of leaders here, and Mr. Harper was asked if he thought the president’s race was helping him forge new relationships. Mr. Harper said he believed that race had some effect — especially because Mr. Obama is “of mixed extraction, which is the more common reality once you get south of the United States” — but added that “in the end, the personality and the policies, these are the things that matter.”
As for the other big draw here, Mr. Chávez, Mr. Harper said he was not surprised to see the Venezuelan leader strike up a relationship with Mr. Obama.
“My observation: President Chávez is a character, and notwithstanding his hard-line ideology that I am a firm opponent of — be under no illusion about that — he’s actually an affable and gregarious and open personality,” Mr. Harper said. “And for whatever reason, he seems in a particularly good mood this weekend, and we’re all grateful for that.”
History LessonAs Mr. Obama said he had much to learn, he found a willing teacher: Mr. Chávez.
The Venezuelan president, parading about the Hyatt in a bright red shirt with a horde of photographers following his every move, worked hard to cozy up to Mr. Obama. On Saturday, a day after their much-publicized handshake, Mr. Chávez showed up with a gift for his American counterpart, a paperback copy of a 1971 book, “The Open Veins of Latin America: Five Centuries of the Pillage of a Continent,” by Eduardo Galeano, an Uruguayan journalist and historian.
The book, an anti-capitalist tractate that details the consequences of 500 years of domination by Europe and the United States, was perhaps an unsurprising selection by Mr. Chávez, whose leftist politics put him so at odds with former President George W. Bush that he repeatedly called Mr. Bush “the devil.”
But there were other reasons that the tome might not have been exactly what Mr. Obama, a best-selling author, was expecting. For one thing, it is in Spanish, a language the president does not speak.
“I thought it was one of Chávez’s books,” Mr. Obama said later. “I was going to give him one of mine.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/19/world/americas/19prexy.html