01 August 2008

Same World, Different Reality

Much to my astonishment, it turns out that there are Americans who think it is good for a Presidential candidate to be popular in Germany but bad to annoy Hollywood. Obama didn't have a bad week in the polls despite lavish coverage of 200,000 Germans chanting his name. He had a bad week because of it.

10 comments:

Brit said...

You know, it never fails to amaze me how vicious and combative these campaigns are, when politically there's so little between everybody.

David said...

45 out of every 48 months, I'd agree with you. Right now, though, the future of the human race is in the balance.

Ali said...

Heh.

Anonymous said...

Now that he has sewn up the lower Rhineland, maybe he can get Guardian readers to write letters to voters in Ohio to put him over the top.

Why would he do such a thing? Three hundred foreign policy advisors and they put him in a Leni Riefenstahl movie?

Brit said...

I can understand that the campaigns have to be vicious for the very reason that there is so little politically to argue about, but I can't understand why voters seem to care so much.

How do you manage to generate such loathing, or even more puzzling, support for one candidate or the other? Is it just tradition?

Anonymous said...

Brit:

The Ostrogoths couldn't figure out the big deal about being Emperor of Rome either. :-)

David said...

Brit: This is exactly how we feel about soccer.

David said...

Peter:

Have you seen Rick Perlstein's complaint about the dastardly Republicans unfairly wrenching this completely innocent Obama campaign event out of context to make it look like Triumph of the Will?

Bret said...

brit wrote: "I can't understand why voters seem to care so much."

Care about what? :-)

joe shropshire said...

This is exactly how we feel about soccer.

Not as flippant as it sounds. In both cases you have a confusion in the middle of the field, that goes on way too long, and that you just hope is going to end in regulation. Games of this sort drive sane people away, and attract hooligans: people who live and die by every imagined swing in momentum, hate the other team's hooligans worse than death itself, and expect their team to do whatever it takes. It's really quite a good correspondence.