Posted on 05/08/2004 7:04:58 PM PDT by Tailgunner Joe
LONDON, May 8 - Earlier this year, George Osborne, a Conservative member of Parliament, took a straw poll of some legislators from his party. The subject was President Bush. The results were not pretty.
"George Bush scares the hell out of me," one Tory said, according to an article by Mr. Osborne in The Spectator. Another told him: "Bush is a man who might wail at the moon. I don't feel comfortable with him." A third said that while he would vote for Bush in November if he could, "I think Anglo-American relations would be better if Kerry won."
That was long before pictures showing the humiliation of Iraqi prisoners were published all over the world, horrifying even Mr. Bush's allies. And the people Mr. Osborne polled were all Conservatives, by tradition and temperament the Republican Party's natural friends across the Atlantic.
But perhaps the only surprising thing about the vehemence of anti-Bush feeling, based on a reading of newspapers, opinion polls and interviews around Europe, is how unsurprising it truly is. In fact, one reason the recent disclosures have proved so damaging to the American cause here is that Mr. Bush had so little good will upon which to draw.
Across Europe, anti-Bush feeling has contributed to a consensus that the coming American election is of singular importance: for the United States, certainly, but also for the rest of the world. Anxieties about the direction America is going are accompanied more often than not by a passionate desire, cutting across national borders and party lines, to see President Bush voted out of office in November.
Europeans are in general more liberal than Americans, and among Europe's mainstream liberals, rejecting Mr. Bush is a matter of course. But a strange thing seems to have happened to many conservatives, who would ordinarily be the American president's cheerleaders. Even those who favor him seem loath to admit to wholehearted support, tempering their praise with caveats and qualifications.
It is as if admiring Mr. Bush is seen as slightly shameful among thinking Europeans, like confessing a preference for screw-top wine bottles.
"I must say, he's not very popular," said Sergio Romano, an Italian teacher and commentator who has served as ambassador to NATO and to the former Soviet Union. "It's quite understandable that he wouldn't be popular with the bulk of the center-left European intelligentsia, but he's not very popular with the conservatives or moderates either."
In Britain, Lawrence Freedman, a professor of war studies and the vice principal for research at King's College London, paused for an awkward moment when asked about an article he had written for The Financial Times arguing that Mr. Bush seemed "the safer bet," based on past experiences with second-term United States presidents.
"I wouldn't want to come across as a supporter of President Bush," Mr. Freedman said. "It was more of not being pro-Bush, but of explaining why Europeans, despite appearances, might end up not being unhappy if Bush was elected."
In poll after poll, Europeans have shown themselves to be fervently anti-Bush. In Britain, America's staunchest ally in the war in Iraq, a poll of 1,007 people taken last month for The Times of London by the British polling company Populus found support for Senator John Kerry over President Bush by a margin of 56 to 22 percent.
From America, a poll of people in nine nations conducted by the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press in March found that opinion of the president and, by extension, the United States, had plummeted across Europe since Mr. Bush took office.
In France, the poll found, the president had an 85 percent negative rating; in Britain, 57 percent; in Germany 85 percent; and in Russia, 60 percent.
"People say, 'I'm very frustrated that I can't vote in the U.S. elections, because these are the ones that affect my way of life more than anything else,' " Ken Dubin, a political scientist at Carlos III University in Madrid, said in an interview.
Referring to the prewar meeting last year of President Bush, Prime Minister Tony Blair of Britain and José María Aznar, who was then the prime minister of Spain and whose recent election loss was attributed to antiwar feelings by Spanish voters, Mr. Dubin said, "I've heard the comment, 'One down, two to go.' "
In an editorial in March, the left-leaning British newspaper The Guardian put it more starkly. "Senator Kerry carries the hopes not just of millions of Americans but of millions of British well-wishers, not to mention those of nations throughout Europe and the world," the newspaper wrote. "Nothing in world politics would make more difference to the rest of us than a change in the White House."
Of course there are Bush supporters here. Mr. Osborne is one: "I think he's been a good president for the U.S. and for Britain, and I'd like to see him re-elected," Mr. Osborne said in an interview.
So are leaders like Mr. Blair and Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi of Italy. Many European thinkers, while acknowledging the depth of anti-Bush feeling, say it is simplistic and unfair.
"I was impressed by Bush's reaction to Sept. 11, and how he helped put the country back on its feet," said Laurent Cohen-Tanugi, an international lawyer and political writer in France, and the author of "An Alliance At Risk: The United States and Europe Since Sept. 11."
"Europeans tend to attribute the rift between the U.S. and Europe essentially to one man and one administration, and to believe that the mere election of a different president would mend the relationship quickly," he added. "Unfortunately, the reasons for the current Atlantic divide are deeper and more complex."
Some countries, like Poland, which has committed troops to the war in Iraq, have their own reasons for wanting Mr. Bush to succeed.
"Given that the Polish fate in Iraq is linked with President Bush and his policies, there are more sympathies on the Bush side," said Jacek Saryusz-Wolski, a former European affairs minister who is running for the European Parliament. "We think he's been a decisive and courageous president."
But on the whole it is hard to find unreserved enthusiasm for Mr. Bush in Europe. Not that Senator Kerry is seen as particularly dynamic or gifted, or even as especially likely to solve all of America's foreign-policy problems. But he has one irresistible attraction: his non-Bushness.
Europeans' objections to Mr. Bush are multifaceted. Some are still obsessing about stolen elections and hanging chads. Others cannot get past the president's plain-spoken manner, his proudly aggressive anti-intellectualism, his ties to the religious right and his tendency in public to trip over words and concepts.
The criticism can be expressed in ways that are exceptionally disparaging of an American president.
The Express, a British tabloid, for instance, ridiculed Mr. Bush's news conference last month in an article titled, "The President's Brain Is Missing," saying his performance had revealed him as a "bumbling embarrassment."
The paper printed a series of unflattering photographs showing Mr. Bush's various facial expressions after a reporter asked whether he had made mistakes since the Sept. 11 attacks. "In what was meant to be a rallying defense of the war," the caption read, "George Bush appears alternately flummoxed, panicked, forgetful and distant as he struggles to remember what he's been doing in Iraq for the past year."
But beyond distaste for Mr. Bush's personal style are serious questions about what Europeans see as his American-centric, us-or-them worldview.
These began soon after Mr. Bush took office, when he diverged from the European position on a host of international treaties. Then came Sept. 11, the conflict with Iraq, the subsequent backpedaling about the rationale for entering the war and, now, the prisoner abuse scandal.
"The thing that Europeans cannot understand is how you can vote for a liar," said Peter Schneider, a German essayist and novelist. "Here is somebody who lies about something that leads to a war where tens of thousands of people's lives are involved."
Nor are Europeans thrilled about the American values they feel Mr. Bush has encouraged, in which anti-Europeanism is applauded as a virtue, people boycott French wine in protest at the French position on Iraq and Senator Kerry is ridiculed by the Republicans for being able to speak French.
"The idea that you have a leader of the U.S. who's not interested in listening to his allies is important in the way people perceive Bush," Guillaume Parmentier, director of the French Center on the United States at the French Institute of Foreign Relations, said in an interview. "He has a very simplistic view of the world, which we find difficult to accept. In fact, that we find dangerous."
In Moscow, the political commentator Aleksandr Yanov said Mr. Kerry was a superior candidate for many reasons, high among them that he appears to have a far more nuanced view of the world.
Writing in Nyezavisimaya Gazeta, Mr. Yanov said, "In contrast to Bush, he will never put the Bolshevik principle - 'Those who are not with us are against us' - at the center of his policy."
Nick Clegg, a British Liberal Democrat who is a member of the European Parliament, said it was "difficult to exaggerate" the European hope that President Bush would lose the election - particularly in Brussels, whose multilateral ethos is mightily offended by Mr. Bush's unilateralism.
"At the moment, a consideration or analysis of Kerry's positions is pretty underdeveloped," Mr. Clegg said in an interview. "Partly, it's because it's still early days and he hasn't revealed his hand fully. But what really drives people is alarm about George Bush's policies, more than some overwhelming attraction to Kerry.
"Kerry's greatest attraction is that he's not George Bush."
Standard reaction of terrorists and wimps. Same t&w's feel much better about Kerry.
When you next need to dial USA-0911 because some radical islamist or other totalitarian nation is kicking your sorry a**, you'll forgive us if we don't pick up the phone, won't you? Just leave a message. We'll get back to you, if ... Well, maybe we'll be too busy. You see, we don't want to offend your sense of political correctness.
I knew we should have teamed up with the Germans when we had the chance back in the forties. Sigh.
If you find one let me know, I can not think of a downside of this either.
One more reason to vote for Bush!
I own a Small Business and I have been contacted by people wanting to conduct a study of my business needs or my investment tendencies, and i hang up on them 99% of the time, I think I would probably do the same to a political pollster as well. I believe most these Polls are contacting House Wives and the unemployed until about 3 weeks before the election.
I remember like yesterday when all the Polls showed Reagan way behind Mondale in 1984, and he won by a landslide, it was the same when GHW Bush won by a wide margin against Dukakis, and we all know how that one ended up as well
The fact of the matter is that all the average European (outside of Great Britain which isn't really European) gets is virulently leftist press. So even people who might be conservative, are anti-Bush as a knee-jerk reaction. In many places, European is nearly synonymous with anti-Bush.
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