When President Obama and leaders of Asian nations meet here Monday they will feel the tug of history and a bit of glamour on an estate where Ronald Reagan wandered around in slippers, Frank Sinatra sipped drinks by the pool and Dwight D. Eisenhower suggested that the nine-hole golf course could use a few palm trees.

No matter how small their post, every embassy public affairs officer who ever arranged an exchange, distributed a pamphlet, or in the jargon of contemporary public diplomacy fretted over "moving the needle" of foreign public opinion knows that a U.S. presidential election is an opportunity. Traditionally they have been animated quadrennial civics classes, dramatizing America's democratic process and contrasting starkly with the brutality with which power changes hands or not in too much of the world.