Greatest show on Earth
Right plot, great cast -- the White House run has the whole world watching.
American presidential elections have become the political equivalent of soccer's World Cup. Half the planet watches on television. Everyone recognizes the star players, and most know the rules of the game. Strike up a conversation with a stranger in any bar in any city on any continent and you can be fairly sure the talk will turn to "who are you backing, Hillary or Obama?"
Probably we Europeans don't know the rules of the American game as well as we think, but it's amazing what knowledge of U.S. politics British reporters take for granted. This morning, I heard a BBC radio correspondent say, "Remember, of course, that Ohio is a swing state in American elections."
Of course. There is no other foreign story for which an assumption like this could be made. It's as if half the world lives inside the Beltway. (That's the ring road round Washington -- I don't need to explain.)
Send us an e-mail, cried another British radio presenter, and tell us who you backed. Though Super Tuesday is only the electoral equivalent of a soccer quarterfinal, we were all captivated. "It was the biggest day so far in the race for the most powerful job in the world," gushed a presenter on a pop music station.
There's a rational element to this fascination: It matters enormously to all of us who the next president of the United States will be, especially after two terms of George W. Bush making such a hash of it. But actually, who succeeds President Hu Jintao of China or Vladimir V. Putin of Russia will be pretty important for us too. Yet no one sends text-messages or e-mails to their friends saying, "Who are you backing, Xi or Li?" Most of them don't even know who's Hu.
People are drawn irresistibly to the American presidential race because it's like an exciting horse race or a well-made soap opera -- precisely the qualities that the political institutions of the European Union most spectacularly lack.
As with "Desperate Housewives" or HBO's mesmerizing "The Wire," the reality show we call "The American Election" has -- this time particularly -- a cast of strong, contrasting, remarkable characters: Hillary, Obama, McCain, the egregious Mitt and the folksy Huckabee. (As in all good soap operas, one name only is required for most of the characters.)
