U.S. Elections Global Perspective

Mad Dog is stunned to see how many viewers follow Hampton, New Hampshire from Australia, France, India, Korea and places most people in New Hampshire could not reliably be counted on to be able to find on a map. 

(Mad Dog has found the little function key which shows where people viewing his blog are located. Viewing does not mean following or even liking, but at least Mad Dog can see, there were some people out there watching.)

Here in the Shire, the rest of the world is just some blurry smudge over the horizon, and on the Seacoast, the farthest we can see is, on a clear day, the Isles of Shoals, which are 15 miles off the coast, but on a clear New Hampshire day, they look as if you could reach out and touch them, if you just waded out a little way into the surf.

Angela Merkel, David Cameron, Silvio Berlusconi are names which mean nothing to most of the folks here in Hampton. They may have heard of Dominique Strauss Kahn, but they could not tell you he was a likely next head of state of France, until his behavior in a New York hotel made headlines.

So why would a reader in Korea care about what a Mad Dog Democrat in New Hampshire thinks?  Why should someone in Australia log on to Mad Dog's blog?

It cannot be our politics are more interesting than those in Europe, Asia or Australia.

Maybe we are  simply bizarre enough to be entertaining.  After all, we elect a half Black man, whose middle name is Hussein, following a half witted Texan/New England dunce.  This new President, is, like the rest of us, from nowhere, or from everywhere, from Indonesia, Hawaii, California, New York City, Cambridge, Massachusetts, Chicago, and he emerges, this chimera, who is one of the finest writers of his time, who is thoughtful, elegant and incapable of bombast, and he gets elected in a country of Joe Sixpacks, guys who love guns, women who watch American Idol and the Karkashians, and as soon as he starts, before he can even start, he has to grab of wheel of an economy which is careening toward the cliff, headed straight for the next Great Depression. Somehow, at the last moment,  in a scene worthy of American Graffiti, he swerves us clear of the abyss, rejecting the "Austerity" solution of Europe and driving us down the middle road to a slow but steady recovery.

But then, a chameleon of a Republican, who says the only thing standing between America and a booming economy is government intervention and regulation, until his first debate when he denies all that, and the chameleon accuses the President of not being a good dance partner, not wanting to be bipartisan when for almost 4 years his the Republican party has been cleaving to the Tea Party of no compromise, no cooperation, government is bad and gridlock is good, which makes it the President's fault for not cooperating.

I guess, I can see it now. This American soap opera beats even the hijinks of  Berlusconi and DSK, the stupidity of Cameron and Merkel, the resentment of the Northern Europeans over the indolence of the Southern Europeans. 

We are simply the best show in town.