An informal survey of more than two dozen UN staff members and foreign delegates showed that the overwhelming majority would prefer that Senator Barack Obama wins the presidency, saying they think that the Democrat would usher in a new agenda of multilateralism after an era marked by Republican disdain for the world body.
William Luers, the executive director of the United Nations Association, said: "It would be hard to find anybody, I think, at the UN who would not believe that Obama would be a considerable improvement over any other alternative. It's been a bad eight years, and there is a lot of bad feeling over it."