(disclaimer: I'm going to tell you what the opinion of Australian people towards the election is. If you don't care what their opinion is then you can quit reading. I'm not suggesting to you that these opinions should matter to you. I personally care what other countries think of mine, however I know a lot of Americans might say, I could care less what Australia thinks of my politics. Ok thats your right to think that, I disagree, but I'm not here to have that discussion. I'm here to tell you what people down here think.)
Everyone down here dislikes Bush. The reasons are
- The Iraq War. He started a war with a Iraq because that country was holding WMD's and he felt there was a possibility Iraq would use those weapons against the US. Its now known that the evidence of WMD's was incorrect. Austraila sent people to fight in this war, they now feel the war was unjustified and feel like they were lied to, mislead, however you wanna call it.
- The Financial Crisis. I think I know enough about Finance to say that you can't blame this on one person or party. But it is a fact that America is to blame for this current crisis. Bush was the man at the top when it happened, so he is going to take the blame. The Australian dollar has lost almost 40% in value in the past 3 months. People here can no long afford to travel outside the country cause their currency is down so low.
- He is not very well spoken. People just generally think hes not very bright.
Obama is seen as the young cool candidate who is going to change the direction of American politics. Obviously people down here could care less about American tax rates so Obama is the guy everyone loves. He says he will sit down with world leaders from hostile countries, try to end the war in Iraq asap, these things are very appealing to non American observers.
I watched the election today from the TV room in my hostel. It was me, about 10 Irish people, 2 from the UK, 3 for Ozzie, and a French guy. It was 3 Ozzie guys sitting in a studio talking about US politics. They would go back and forth from their own analysis to the ABC feed from America. I can't explain to you how strange it was to listen to Obama and McCains speeches around a bunch of non-Americans. Both of them kept repeatedly saying things like "America is the greatest country in the world", "Americans are the best at ...", etc... I'm not saying this was bad, just strange for me in that situation.
I thought Obama's speech was one of the better I've ever heard from a President. I literally had Goosebumps and wanted to bust into a "USA! USA!" chant. But I sat solemnly and tried to be respectful of the fact that most of the people didn't care as much as me, or cared in a much different way than I do.
One last thing I will say. You can argue that its based on incorrect logic and that you don't care, but it is true that Obama becoming President will greatly improve Americas reputation around the globe over McCain becoming President, and this is a good thing.
2 comments:
Interesting perspective from another resident of Australia...
http://freakonomics.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/11/04/whats-with-all-the-ideology/
Bummer that Bush gets blamed for an economic crisis he predicted and then tried to prevent with legislature that was blocked by the democratic house. That's kind of like being pro-life and blamed for abortion.
Also interesting to note, although Obama won the presidency on the minority vote, on all the states that had other issues up for election, none of the groups that elected him voted for the issue that he supported. He was elected largely by a group of people who disagrees with the things that he wanted.
While those two are perplexing and negative, it is cool that we have an African American as president (huge step forward for our countries racial issues I would think), and I hope he continues to work on that issue, as well as improving our national image so that other countries think that we are cool.
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