- Joined
- Oct 27, 2006
With the election tomorrow...I am just wondering what kind of coverage the election is getting in other countries and what they think about the candidates?
Have some friends in France and Germany. In both countries, it seems McCain is uniformly portrayed as a senile warmonger, and Obama as the next JFK.
This may not be what you had in mind, but there's a story at msnbc.com about worldwide interest in the election. It appears to be pretty high.
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However, she said there is no Canadian party "conservative" enough to run on a platform that health care is a privilege or just another commodity. On the other hand, no party there is "liberal" enough to run on a platform of intentional deficit spending.
Susan
That's actually so not true. I still have my Spiegel (Germany's leftie weekly magazine) that concentrates on Obama (before he visited Berlin) and warns the readers / the population of too much enthusiasm, criticises his policies concerning the judical system (death penalty), weapons, national security... I also have a collection of articles from El País, Le Monde, El Mundo, The Times, FAZ and NZZ that focussed on his shift to the centre after winning the decisive primaries and criticised those as politcal opportunism.Have some friends in France and Germany. In both countries, it seems McCain is uniformly portrayed as a senile warmonger, and Obama as the next JFK.
The one thing that stands out to me is that race seems to be a much bigger and more polarized opinion in the US than it is here in the UK. Don't get me wrong racism is still very much an issue in the UK but my impression from debatnig this with friends all over the world is that racism is still a massive issue in the US.
Ant
Very interesting obeservation. Why do you think racism is not as a massive issue in the UK as it is in the US?
Many friends have often thought that racism in the US is true to the word race. Prejudices are truly based on the race of the person, whereas in the UK i think racism is largely based on biggotry regarding skin colour.
On the other hand, I like it that the US is at least very sensitive about this matter. In Japan, for example, racism is perceived less an issue perhaps merely because there is less racial/ethnic diversity here. Perhaps minorities do not have enough political power to bring all that attention and therefore racism is simply less visible. But this does not mean that racism here is less serious.
Do you mean racial/ethnic group membership matters more in the US (and therefore it is more fixed) whereas skin color matters more in the UK (and therefore it is more vague)?
I myself do think that the US is such a race-sensitive society and one's racial/ethnic group membership means really a lot. I wonder if it is because it has been a racialized society with the histories of slavery and the import of cheap labors from foreign countries.
One of my profs who is a Japanese American in her 60s is sensitive about racial/ethnic issues and the Japanese concentration camps during WW2 still trigger a lot in her discussions. But being from a much younger generation and also from the mainland Japan, I do not have anyone in my networks who had experienced any serious racism and myself have had no negative experiences due to my Japanese background living in the contemporary North America. I have received no differential treatment in any institutions. As for everyday interactions, I am very often noticed as being a Japanese while I walk around. But this has brought me only positive experiences/encounters. This would be a big change seen from the level of prejudice against Japanese several decades ago. On the other hand, I hear a lot of negative stories from ppl from some other racial/ethnic backgrounds about being discriminated against at institutions and in everyday life.