If You Vote For McCain-Palin... Pick Your City

And get ready for a draft... because, like Pat Buchanan said, McCain "will make Cheney look like Gandhi."



Yesterday we mentioned that out of 22 countries polled about the U.S. election, residents in 22 of them thought Obama was the best choice for president. If you follow my travel blog at all, you probably know when I'm not blogging, I'm in Afghanistan, Myanmar, Argentina, or Thailand, Morocco, Sri Lanka or... on the road to Timbuktu. Early in Bush's first term I fell off a mountain in Cappadocia. We met some kind simple peasants down at the bottom of the mountain. They didn't speak much English but they knew enough to say "Bush no good." It was pretty much the reaction we got from people everywhere in the world we went for the past 6-7 years. After 2004 it got much worse-- because people thought Americans were idiots... or complicit.

Sympathy wore thin-- real thin. Sometimes I sensed real hostility. I lived overseas for seven years. I travel overseas every year at least a couple times. I see fewer and fewer Americans abroad these days.

Today's Guardian picked up on the same phenomena I've been noticing and Jonathan Freedland warns that it could get much worse if Americans are foolish enough to opt for a third Bush term. And reading his column gives you the distinct idea that people in Britain-- who have Obama over McCain by a wide margin-- may be more informed about our presidential politics than many of us are!

If Sarah Palin defies the conventional wisdom that says elections are determined by the top of the ticket, and somehow wins this for McCain, what will be the reaction? Yes, blue-state America will go into mourning once again, feeling estranged in its own country. A generation of young Americans - who back Obama in big numbers - will turn cynical, concluding that politics doesn't work after all. And, most depressing, many African-Americans will decide that if even Barack Obama-- with all his conspicuous gifts-- could not win, then no black man can ever be elected president.

But what of the rest of the world? This is the reaction I fear most. For Obama has stirred an excitement around the globe unmatched by any American politician in living memory. Polling in Germany, France, Britain and Russia shows that Obama would win by whopping majorities, with the pattern repeated in Africa, Asia, the Middle East and Latin America. If November 4 were a global ballot, Obama would win it handsomely. If the free world could choose its leader, it would be Barack Obama.

The crowd of 200,000 that rallied to hear him in Berlin in July did so not only because of his charisma, but also because they know he, like the majority of the world's population, opposed the Iraq war. McCain supported it, peddling the lie that Saddam was linked to 9/11. Non-Americans sense that Obama will not ride roughshod over the international system but will treat alliances and global institutions seriously: McCain wants to bypass the United Nations in favour of a US-friendly League of Democracies. McCain might talk a good game on climate change, but a repeated floor chant at the Republican convention was "Drill, baby, drill!", as if the solution to global warming were not a radical rethink of the US's entire energy system but more offshore oil rigs.

If Americans choose McCain, they will be turning their back on the rest of the world, choosing to show us four more years of the Bush-Cheney finger. And I predict a deeply unpleasant shift.

Until now, anti-Americanism has been exaggerated and much misunderstood: outside a leftist hardcore, it has mostly been anti-Bushism, opposition to this specific administration. But if McCain wins in November, that might well change. Suddenly Europeans and others will conclude that their dispute is with not only one ruling clique, but Americans themselves. For it will have been the American people, not the politicians, who will have passed up a once-in-a-generation chance for a fresh start - a fresh start the world is yearning for.

And the manner of that decision will matter, too. If it is deemed to have been about race-- that Obama was rejected because of his colour-- the world's verdict will be harsh. In that circumstance, Slate's Jacob Weisberg wrote recently, international opinion would conclude that "the United States had its day, but in the end couldn't put its own self-interest ahead of its crazy irrationality over race."

Even if it's not ethnic prejudice, but some other aspect of the culture wars, that proves decisive, the point still holds. For America to make a decision as grave as this one-- while the planet boils and with the US fighting two wars-- on the trivial basis that a hockey mom is likable and seems down to earth, would be to convey a lack of seriousness, a fleeing from reality, that does indeed suggest a nation in, to quote Weisberg, "historical decline." Let's not forget, McCain's campaign manager boasts that this election is "not about the issues."

Of course I know that even to mention Obama's support around the world is to hurt him. Incredibly, that large Berlin crowd damaged Obama at home, branding him the "candidate of Europe" and making him seem less of a patriotic American. But what does that say about today's America, that the world's esteem is now unwanted? If Americans reject Obama, they will be sending the clearest possible message to the rest of us-- and, make no mistake, we shall hear it.

And part of that message will be that an unending barrage of media-debunked lies-- several a week in fact-- is the new yardstick of America's failed-- post-dumbed down-- experiment with democracy.