SOMEONE shared an article about next week’s US presidential election on Facebook recently. The article, published in the Wall Street Journal, was written by Peggy Noonan, a bestselling American author, well-connected journalist, a consultant on The West Wing and a former speechwriter for Ronald Reagan. She suggested that many Americans have a less than flattering view of their current president and that the more they see of him, and get beneath the flashy hope-y change-y rhetoric of his first campaign, the less they like him.
The trolls were immediately out of the gates; an unemployed graduate from Strathclyde University dismissed the article as “a notch below polemic, not journalism”; a woman from Northern Ireland lambasted the piece as a “wailing hysterical rant”; and so it went on, with the comments drifting onto a theme that no American Republican could be intelligent.
This sort of response is inevitable from European liberals who see America’s most left-wing president as some sort of messiah, who can never be questioned, ever, by anyone. And that anyone who does must be intellectually subnormal. How dare some well informed American political observer say Obama is not perfect, when there are unemployed graduates in Europe who know better?
Anyone who actually talks to Americans, rather than getting their views double filtered through the US’s east coast liberals and the European left-wing press, will know that the overwhelming view of Barack Obama’s presidency is one of disillusionment.
That is not to say that people will switch their vote to Mitt Romney, but they may decide to go to the mall or clear up the yard, rather than traipse down to the voting booth. Or perhaps they will still vote Obama, reluctantly.
Obama’s first, successful, run for the White House was a triumph of style over substance, this time round people are digging deeper. The question that Americans are really asking themselves is, “How’s that hope-y change-y thing working out?”
The answer is: not too good. Since Obama took office gas (petrol) has doubled in price and the number of welfare recipients getting food vouchers has soared, as the number of people living in poverty increases.
Bill Clinton famously said: “It’s the economy, stupid” but it is more than just Obama’s catastrophic economic performance that is putting Americans off him. There is something about his general attitude and demeanour that puts ordinary people off.
Obama was the first president to preside over a cut to the credit rating of the United States, but he was also the first president to require all Americans to purchase a product from a third party, ie medical insurance. It may seem odd to Europeans, used to the state attending to their welfare from cradle to grave, but many Americans deeply resent their government interfering in their lives, even if it is for their own good.
When it comes to politicians telling people how to live, Americans take it very personally indeed. That great American everyman, Homer Simpson, voted for Romney in a recent episode of The Simpsons as a protest against Michelle Obama’s anti-obesity campaign, saying: “I’ve already got one wife telling me to eat healthy.”
A moment of satire that contains more than a grain of truth.
When Mitt Romney was caught making some off-the-cuff remarks about the 47 per cent of Americans who are dependent on the state and who see themselves as “victims”, who do not “take personal responsibility for their lives”, Europeans were shocked, but many Americans thought he was making a good point about how Obama is driving America towards a European-style dependency culture.
Alex Huston is a student from Belfast who is currently sleeping in a temporary dormitory in a warehouse in Texas, behind the Republican campaign offices where he is working as a volunteer for the election campaign. It is the sort of place that the BBC goes to sneer rather than report.
Alex says: “People here are really angry about Obamacare [mandatory health insurance], you see lots of ‘Repeal Obamacare’ bumper stickers around. They also believe that if Obama wins again next month America is genuinely doomed to becoming like Greece.
“The attack on the Benghazi embassy in September has been hyped up a lot. Many think that Obama lied, diluted the truth around what really happened there. But jobs and the economy really are the huge issues here. Everything else is secondary.”
Bob Woodward, one of the journalists who unearthed the Watergate scandal that led to the resignation of President Nixon, recently published a book on the Obama presidency which paints a picture of a man who is out of his depth but too full of himself to realise it. Woodward reveals Obama to be an arrogant intellectual who is ignorant of real-world politics. Yet despite all this it is going to be a tough job for Mitt Romney to take the White House; the Magic Pants thing will be a hang up for many, as will his own variety of Republican elitism and too-sweet-to-be-wholesome family values.