The Question: The U.S. starts to choose a president this week. If you could send the candidates one message, what would it be?

When I read these comments from our panelists and readers, I think: Maybe the presidential election process that began last week shows that we really are turning a page -- not just America, but the whole Bush-fatigued world.

What I hear in this PostGlobal discussion is this: America needs to be true to its own values. It needs to reconnect with the qualities that made America powerful and respected. What's striking to me is that the world (as represented by our PostGlobal sample) and the voters of Iowa are sending the same message: It's time for a change.

The Current Discussion: The slaughter last week of Kikuyus and Luos in Kenya reminded us that this is a world of tribes. How should wise governments deal with the reality of tribal loyalties and tribal violence?

A lot of what appears on PostGlobal is critical of the United States, and quite properly. But on this question of tribal violence, I think the U.S. of A. actually has something to teach the world. America's gift in the 21st century is that we have learned how to make a diverse, multicultural society work.

That wasn't always the case. It took America many decades to grapple with the legacy of slavery, which the sociologist Gunnar Myrdal called our "original sin." But nobody who knows America can deny that we are a different country today in terms of racial relations than we were 40 years ago. This was a painful process of change, sometimes marked by violence. But if you want to see the harvest of good that we have reaped, just watch Barack Obama on the campaign trail. If an African-American can win the Democratic primary in the white-bread state of Iowa, then we've come a long way.

America's ability to absorb Latino immigrants is being tested now, because of the huge influx of illegal immigrants. But still, this is basically a success story. Hispanic Americans are an increasingly prosperous and dynamic community.

This is America's gift: We bring together hard-working, talented people from around the world. We give them a chance to compete and prosper. Our multi-cultural society manages the tricky balance of assimilating people to certain common values, while at the same time allowing them to be faithful to their ethnic roots. We do a lot of things wrong, but this is a case where America has it right.

The Current Discussion: With the U.S. presidential primary season in full swing, there's a lot of talk here about "change" vs. "competence" in leadership. Which does your country have more of? Is that a good thing?

Here in the land of the fifteen-second attention span, we tend to be suckers for any political pitch that mentions change. Kennedy, Carter, Clinton -- they all promised change. For that matter, so did the brooding, volcanic Nixon and even the grandfatherly Reagan.

And it's not just in politics that we see this American addiction. In business, every chief executive promises to be a "change agent." Billions of dollars have been destroyed in these vain efforts at transformation--just look at the AOL-Time Warner merger for an example of smart people doing dumb things in the name of change.

I'm told that a gathering of U.S. intelligence officials several years ago was given a "Transformation Manifesto" with bromides like, "Instead of a chief innovation officer, our organizations may need a chief destruction officer" and, "Transformation is not a destination. It is a journey." Yikes! No wonder the U.S. intelligence community is such a mess.

Certainly America needs change, politically. After seven years, the Bush administration is a spent force. But even more, it needs competence. The truly egregious mistakes of the Bush administration were its management failures -- the ruinous mismanagement of post-war Iraq by the CPA, the stunningly botched response to Hurricane Katrina.

I'd be happy if Obama (or Hillary, or McCain, for that matter) said: I will bring change. And the essence of that change will be that the U.S. government will function effectively again, and that its leaders will make good decisions.

We don't need a change agent. We need a president.