Say Anything Blog

It’s the same thing they did with Kerry.  The world loves the Democrat candidate.  They hate the Republican.  Because this isn’t really an American election, I guess, so world opinion matters.

June 10 (Bloomberg)—The world made its preference clear for U.S. president long before the Democratic Party weeded out Hillary Clinton last week.

Global Obamamania has spread in South Asia, where Obama lived as a child—in Indonesia. It has reached Africa, where his Kenyan father, a goat herder turned economist, was born. For their part, Europeans consider Obama a hybrid of John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King, embodying the American dream and their own worldliness.

Never have foreign media given so much air time and spilled so much ink over a U.S. primary race. And whatever Americans decide in November, foreigners would pick Obama in a landslide without knowing the details of his policies: a true triumph of hope over experience.

Foreigners would pick Obama without knowing the details of his policies?  Anyone else find that preference for form over substance a little...disturbing?  I thought judging “books” by their “covers” was a bad thing?  Are we supposed to find these foreigners, who are apparently supporting Obama out of some fawning notion that he’s a JFK/MLK hybrid, wise in their superficially-arrived at preference?

If anything, this proves why Americans have chosen the leaders that have made America the world’s only superpower.

And even so, I reject the notion that Bush has brought nothing but eight years of international scorn to America.  Remember when Bush took office, and when he was making the case for invading Iraq, his most vocal detractors among our allies were Paul Martin in Canada, Jaques Chirac in France and Gerhard Schroeder in Germany.  Now at the end of Bush’s term all three of those leaders have been replaced in office by decidedly more US-friendly leaders.  Canada enjoys the leadership of conservative Prime Minister Stephen Harper.  Germany is now led by the much warmer-to-America Angela Merkel.  Even France has a leader with a pronounced pro-US attitude in Nicolas Sarkozy.

If anything, it would seem to this observer as though Bush will leave office with friendlier ties with many of our traditional allies than when he entered office.  Sure America still faces denouncements from tin-pot dictators like Hugo Chavez and Mahmoud Ahmedinejad on the floor of the United States, but who cares what the brigands and thugs of the international community think of our country?