Monday, February 09, 2004
The 'ABB' vote
The host of the BBC program "Dateline London" on Sunday put the question to the journalist from Le Monde : What do you know about Sen. John Kerry and what makes you think he would be a good president? The answer was surprisingly blunt: "He's not Bush."
This seems to typify the Continental attitude toward the presidential race. People I've met here have been quite polite about it, but it goes without saying that Bush has very few friends or fans here, outside of Number 10. Colleagues at the ICTY are watching the election with greater interest than I expected, maybe with greater interest than most Americans at this early stage. But there's no great debate about the hoped-for outcome, only a question of which Democrat should be elected. Nobody really knows whether Kerry would be more worldly than Bush, less unilateral in his thinking. It's assumed he will be, because he's, well, Anybody But Bush.
Of course, it's a little more nuanced than this back home among the "party faithful" who show up at these events. My own 43rd District notwithstanding, I was heartened to see the Dems in Washington had the sense to abandon their infatuation with Howard Dean. I'll claim credit for consistently calling him a charlatan, the sort of "angry guy" that Democrats find so attractive early in the process. He isn't really even a liberal in the Rep. Jim McDermott sense of the word, which is what makes his success in the 43rd so puzzling. I will, however, concede that I, too, got so caught up in the media's campaign-as-horserace coverage that I as much as wrote off Kerry weeks ago. Personally, I relished the prospect of slugging it out with the Deanites at the caucuses in support of Wesley Clark, Our Very Own General. I guess I could have predicted that Dennis Kucinich, he of the "Department of Peace", would outpoll the "hero of Kosovo" more than 2-to-1 in Seattle's core. Don't I look smart now for having absentmindedly declared myself a Kerry supporter to one of his campaign staff a few months back, even if it was just to get him off the phone?
Maybe the country, and Washington, as far as that goes, is taking a more pragmatic, European approach to the election and realizing that though Dean is "ABB", he's also something else: unelectable. In any event, the message is clear here now: "Go Kerry."
This seems to typify the Continental attitude toward the presidential race. People I've met here have been quite polite about it, but it goes without saying that Bush has very few friends or fans here, outside of Number 10. Colleagues at the ICTY are watching the election with greater interest than I expected, maybe with greater interest than most Americans at this early stage. But there's no great debate about the hoped-for outcome, only a question of which Democrat should be elected. Nobody really knows whether Kerry would be more worldly than Bush, less unilateral in his thinking. It's assumed he will be, because he's, well, Anybody But Bush.
Of course, it's a little more nuanced than this back home among the "party faithful" who show up at these events. My own 43rd District notwithstanding, I was heartened to see the Dems in Washington had the sense to abandon their infatuation with Howard Dean. I'll claim credit for consistently calling him a charlatan, the sort of "angry guy" that Democrats find so attractive early in the process. He isn't really even a liberal in the Rep. Jim McDermott sense of the word, which is what makes his success in the 43rd so puzzling. I will, however, concede that I, too, got so caught up in the media's campaign-as-horserace coverage that I as much as wrote off Kerry weeks ago. Personally, I relished the prospect of slugging it out with the Deanites at the caucuses in support of Wesley Clark, Our Very Own General. I guess I could have predicted that Dennis Kucinich, he of the "Department of Peace", would outpoll the "hero of Kosovo" more than 2-to-1 in Seattle's core. Don't I look smart now for having absentmindedly declared myself a Kerry supporter to one of his campaign staff a few months back, even if it was just to get him off the phone?
Maybe the country, and Washington, as far as that goes, is taking a more pragmatic, European approach to the election and realizing that though Dean is "ABB", he's also something else: unelectable. In any event, the message is clear here now: "Go Kerry."
