And across Africa - while there is an appreciation that America's leader has had plenty on his plate elsewhere, with the financial crisis and the turmoil in the Middle East - there is also a niggling belief that this trip has come a little late in his presidency, and that with Chinese investment flooding in, the US no longer carries quite such clout on the continent.
Today they're still courting cult alternative names – St Vincent guests on the upcoming new album Born in the Echoes – but the tunes, though still impactful, have no such crossover clout.
Russia's greens do not have such clout.
Three separate factors explain why Germany carries such clout.
That's why Mr. Summers's relatively dovish comments about U.S. deficit reduction should carry such clout.
The families of the victims killed and wounded in the Virginia Tech massacre do not come close to having such clout.
"I'd expect better behavior from a company with such clout in the transportation industry," he said.
He boasted that Seif had enjoyed such clout, in fact, that "if he had asked the president of Libya's central bank for ten million dollars, he'd had been given it, no questions asked".
The proposal has drawn strong opposition from the city's taxi operators, who have such clout with the City Council that Mayor Bloomberg took his cause to Albany.
It punctures the mystique that helped allow the security services to gain such clout under Vladimir Putin, Russia's former president and present prime minister and a former KGB spy.
