http://www.chroniclesmagazine.org/?p=770#comments
Europe Rooting for Obama
by Srdja Trifkovic
In Europe, which I've been visiting for the past month, no American
presidential election since 1960 has been followed with such interest, passion
even, as this one. All over the Continent, with the irrelevant exception of
Georgia, the elite class is rooting for Obama and hoi polloi are following the
lead. When Obama toured Europe last July he was courted by political leaders as
if he were already in the White House, while a crowd of 200,000 in Berlin gave
him a frenzied welcome not seen since that Ich bin ein Berliner speech.
That leftist radicals and neo-Marxists who run the European Union adore Obama
is normal. They, too, are dirigiste statists and therefore like his desire to
tax and redistribute wealth and create an ever more dependent welfariat.
Theyshare with him the assumtions about man and society especially a society
based on European heritage that are essentially revolutionary. After eight
years of "the culturally alien" Bush, "the transatlantic relationship needs a
positive figure with which it can identify," says Thomas Klau of the European
Council on Foreign Relations.
Western Europe's political leaders and bien-pensants can identify with Obama
and especially the color of his skin because they are ashamed of their
whiteness. They share his hostility to any form of European or, in America's
case, Euro-derived ethnic or cultural coherence, which is flatly equated with
"racism." Even the Economist of London subscribes to this view. Obama's
victory, it opined, "would salve, if not close, the ugly wound left by
America's history."
According to Dominique Moisi of the French Institute for International
Relation, the perception in Europe is that Obama can transform the view that
the U.S. and the West have of themselves: "For many Europeans, a reinvention of
America is Europe's last hope." Obama's role thus becomes that of a secular
Messiah who will redeem the guilt-ridden heirs of a morally unsustainable
Western civilization by helping liquidate it.
In the eastern half of Europe in Russia, and less importantly in Serbia,
Belarus, Armenia, and the anti-Yushchenko half of Ukraine the sentiment is
anti-McCain, rather than pro-Obama. McCain's visceral Russophobia, his services
to the Albanian lobby over Kosovo, his insistence that Ukraine's future is in
NATO, and his unrestrained support of "Misha" (Saakashvili), make him loathed
on realist grounds of old geopolitics. Obama's ideology and domestic agenda
appear relatively insignificant to those who feel existentially threatened by
McCain and all he stands for.
The European Right (or, rather, its smouldering remnant) is staying quiet,
aware that there is little to commend McCain except alleged domestic
lesser-evilism. Paul Johnson, the conservative British writer and historian,
rightly points out that "Obama is not the man to sort out America's problems.
He's full of high-falutin waffle. We just do not know what he stands for.
Americans have a lot of common sense and know rough times lie ahead. That is
why America needs a leader from the right."
Johnson is wrong, however, to assume that John McCain is either "a leader" or
"from the right." He is neither, and tonight the GOP and the nation will pay
the price.
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