Across the pond

Just before the Texas et al primaries, NPR aired a couple of stories about which American candidates were preferred by the “man-on-the-street” in Iraq and Britain. No prizes for guessing who was preferred.

This seems to be scraping the bottom of the barrel for stories. It is not exactly a secret that Western European politics tends to run much more along statist and socialist lines than American, and so they quite naturally find more in common with left wing Democrats. (And I gather that Americans who don’t think “nationalism” is a dirty word scare the bejabbers out of them.) And given that most of the news is about the hotly contested race, that reporting tends to be biased in favor of Democrats, and that Iraqis have few other useful sources of information about the candidates besides the current US reporting, they’ll tend to favor the candidates they hear about.

In US Olympic reporting, reporters will interview the gymnast’s trainer’s wife to try to fill the time (ignoring non-US contestants, as a rule). This is equally silly. In any event, British opinions about our candidates matter about as much as my opinions on the best Mayor for Lyons.