2008-08-11

Mind the Gap

Well, since I was in attendence that day, I think I'm left with a bit of a need to discuss Barack Obama's European Tour.

Firstly, in a word, it was incredibly stupid.

Nevermind the odd tendency for Obama to attract the sort of screaming Beatlemania-style moronic granola-crunching crowd (who, as we've discussed in this forum before, protest and gather in disproportionate numbers to their actual influence), but why on earth would Europeans (or Democrats, who sometimes are hard to tell apart) think it at all helps Obama's case that a bunch of German and French and English soccer hooligans go crazy for the idea of a worthless shell of a man ascending to the highest office on the planet merely because he's negro?

To understand what I mean, lets turn the tables around. Say it was six months or so before the mandatory British election (so 55 months after the previous election), and opposition leader David Cameron (a Conservative) decided to spend a couple of weeks in the United States bible belt touring around pseudo-campaigning for #10. Every night CNN and BBC World are showing huge crowds of evangelical Christians chanting and cheering and giving teary interviews to the cameras how they hope that Cameron will win the forthcoming General Election.

Would this impress the average British voter? Would swing voters be particularly impressed by such a stunt?

Then why the hell does anybody think that Americans would be impressed by it? Seriously, this is a guy who is spending his time showing off how the citizens of other countries are impressed by him, all the while not realizing how damning a statement it is against him. And the Europeans are all playing along. Its truely unbelievable.