Obama vs. Romney: The American Presidential election viewed from Britain and Europe

‘From a European perspective, it doesn’t matter who wins this election.  Only US foreign policy is important to us — and Obama is no dove and Romney no hawk.  The incumbent president prefers to wage his wars with drones instead of troops, though the victims probably don’t care if they’re killed by man or machine.  Meanwhile, despite all the criticism, his challenger says he wouldn’t join Israel were the country to go to war with Iran because the US can now no longer afford such a thing.

. . . The truth is that we simply no longer understand America.  Looking at the country from Germany and Europe, we see a foreign culture.  The political system is in the hands of big business and its lobbyists.  The checks and balances have failed.  And a perverse mix of irresponsibility, greed and religious zealotry dominate public opinion.

The downfall of the American empire has begun.  It could be that the country’s citizens wouldn’t be able to stop it no matter how hard they tried.  But they aren’t even trying.’

~ Jakob Augstein

‘For a proper conservative, American national politics is a desert.  You can choose between declared liberals and neo-conservatives who are liberal on all important issues.  And that’s it.  Or there’s dear old Ron Paul, who is another sort of liberal, really.  But he’s not important anyway.  There’s nobody who is really socially conservative, above all nobody who will act (it’s decades too late anyway) to end the lax immigration politics which have revolutionised the country and will render it unrecognisable within 30 years.  There’s nobody who will rescue the married family, or protect and recreate manufacturing industry so that ordinary people have proper honest work to do again, or reform the schools, or devise a foreign policy that actually makes the country safer.

What absolutely amazes me about this election is the way that leftish commentators try to build up Mitt Romney as some kind of conservative monster.  If only he were.  But his own record shows otherwise (and I might add, his running mate, whose name I can never remember, is a keen student of Miss Ayn Rand, another liberal) . . .  The ‘Romney is a raging conservative’ claim must be an effort to make a dull contest between two mediocrities, for an over-rated office that isn’t really all that powerful, appear more interesting than it is.

I shan’t be waiting up for the results.  Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof.’

~ Peter Hitchens