It was apparently a rather long speech, with a panoply of various points within it that one can choose among to emphasize – also, if desired, the sheer fact that it was delivered from the Oval Office, something that is generally supposed to denote an especially serious occasion, as Viktoria Unterreiner points out writing for the German paper Die Welt. Still, the title of her piece is “Obama declares the end of ‘cheap oil’,” and that is one aspect of the President’s address that certainly has attracted particular attention over here. Namely: Can America – the land of the Chevy Corvette and Route 66 – really wean itself from cheap oil, even while spurred on by tarred beaches and dying pelicans? Unterreiner is herself doubtful; she notes that, after Obama made that declaration, “he however became no more concrete” about how to go about it. Perhaps a start would be his CO2/climate bill – but that’s currently in “suspended animation” (im Schwebe-zustand) in the Congress.

Our old friend, the Danish journalist-in-US-residence Paul Høi – perhaps partly because he did not have to disrupt his sleep-patterns to watch – also has a piece out on Obama’s address: Obama aims high and hits low. He divides the speech into two very different parts and has very little to say about the first, which he characterizes as simply a populist tirade designed to up his sagging poll numbers by demonstrating that he is in charge and is perfectly able to get tough with BP. No, like Die Welt’s Unterreiner, he’d prefer to focus on the second “idealistic” part where the President announced the end of cheap oil and puts developing new sources of “green” energy on par with the campaign in the 1960s to put an American astronaut on the Moon. “Does he seriously mean that?” he asks. After all, Høi knows the math: to get something like that CO2 bill through the American Senate you need 60 votes, and since there are now 41 Republicans, Obama probably does not have them.

Then again – Obama also did not have 60 votes in the Senate for his Health Care Reform bill, which of course did ultimately pass earlier this year. Yes, I realize that that was true only at the end . . . but give the man a break, Høi is just trying to find some sort of silver lining here, some sign that Obama’s talk about “the end of cheap oil” was more than mere words. Actually, he borrows this silver lining from an analysis by Ezra Kline of the Washington Post, who professes to see signs from the language in Obama’s speech that indicate that the President is in fact serious, more precisely indications of an attitude of “Come with what you’ve got, give me what we can agree on, and will pass a law that will lead us in the right direction” – supposedly also the President’s attitude to Health Care Reform, once he got serious about passing it, and supposedly his attitude now about the CO2 stuck in Congress.

Update: OK, that was a couple of foreign commentators. But you’ve got to think they are on to something with their “Was he serious?” doubts when the same stance is taken by the Rude Pundit. (Warning: As usual, profane language.) “So tell us what to do,” His Rudeness implores. “Lead us. That’s what we want . . . not an especially skilled anchor[man] informing us that oil spills are bad.”

                          

Høi turns out to have some interesting things to say, despite the fact that he might as well be describing a space alien, so far apart are Paul’s libertarian political views and those prevailing in Høi’s native Denmark, land of 25% value-added tax and the world’s highest income tax. He sets up the Republican situation in Kentucky as a straightforward struggle between Rand Paul on one side (“pitchfork Republicanism”) and Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell (he of the “polished floors”) on the other. That’s because Paul is not really of the Republican Party, although he did just win its nomination for Senate in Kentucky – he’s really a creature of the Tea Party, what Høi calls “a fundamentally conservative grassroots movement.”

So the two men are not on the same side, and Paul’s success is a threat to McConnell in two respects, each of which Høi develops clearly:

1. Paul’s political positions are “radical,” even for Republicans, e.g. a balanced-budget amendment to the Constitution, calling a halt to Congressional budget earmarks, abolishing most cabinet departments (Education, Energy, Veterans Affairs) as not prescribed by the Founding Fathers. But the American people are attached to their veterans benefits, their earmarks, their federal education support; such views may be exciting to hear articulated, but ultimately they do not go over well once voters come to realize someone actually wants to put them into practice. The unpopularity Paul is courting among a wider range of national voters, because of his “Republican” label, threatens to damage Republican electoral fortunes on a wider scale;
   
2. Not only Republican electoral fortunes, Rand Paul also threatens Republican office-holders more generally as the new star of the Tea Party movement. For that movement is, if nothing else, anti-incumbent and so potentially hostile to Democrat and Republican alike. Again, the antagonism between Paul and McConnell, despite their ostensible membership in the same party, can be expected to spread more generally to the Tea Party movement offering its own candidates in opposition to incumbent Republican office-holders elsewhere, as has already happened in Utah where (as Høi notes) sitting Senator Bob Bennett was denied renomination on the Republican ticket recently by a voting groundswell of Tea Party activists.
   

[T]his must have made McConnell tear at his thinning hair, for McConnell has done everything he could to obstruct President Obama, he has used all the tricks in the book, the classy ones and the not-so-classy ones, to thwart him, and then into the bargain he has to hear about being accommodating.

That’s just the fickleness of politics, I guess, and that might now be turning against Rand Paul himself due to his post-election PR problems concerning the 1964 Civil Rights Act, which Høi does not bring up; maybe he’s saving that subject for a future column. He also makes no mention, other than speaking in passing of a “career politician” (levebrøds politiker), of Trey Grayson, who was Paul’s actual opponent – not Mitch McConnell – in that recent Kentucky Republican primary. In other words, the Paul vs. McConnell story-line is probably a bit overblown, even if it is also enormously simplifying – maybe Høi needs to do that for his Danish readers. Still, I like his insight into the new Republican candidate for Senate in Kentucky, the sort of American “space alien” about whom he is paid to go live in the US and report.

                          

Here at EuroSavant we have just the guy, someone whose commentary we’ve followed and commented upon many times before, namely Poul Høj, US correspondent for the excellent Danish daily Berlingske Tidende. And Høj has delivered his verdict on the latest Apple sensation, with a recent entry on his “USABlog” called iPad and machine-fanatics.

Don’t get him wrong: Høj is hardly some anti-tech reactionary. No, the introduction of the iPad certainly makes the world of technology a richer place. (Or at least the US part of it; it won’t be on sale over here in the Old Continent until 24 April.) He’s just finds much of the reaction rather disconcerting, like “Jesus!”, “gamechanger!” and (from Newsweek) “the iPad will change everything!”

Wait a second, he says: should I throw away my laptop now? Of course not. Frankly, in Høj’s eyes the iPad furore is merely something he has clearly seen before – and no, he’s not talking about the iPhone, he’s talking about Facebook, which was also supposed to be the next big thing that transformed everything, but which turns out still to have plenty of competitors (like Google Buzz).

Look, Høj writes, the iPad is ultimately just another gadget, just another machine, with its fans and detractors, its advantages and its disadvantages. The latter, by the way, are considerable and he provides his list:

• No printer;
  
• No USB ports;
  
• Famously, no Adobe Flash-video;
  
• No multitasking;
  
• No camera;
  
• No kitchen sink – sorry, that’s not Høj, I sneaked that one in;
  
• And most of all, no “apps” available that would pose any threat in the least to Steve Jobs or his company, since they all have to be Apple-approved to be available for download/sale in the first place.

It’s good to have the iPad, to be sure, but in Høj’s eyes it’s just another purchase-choice. Is it enough to tempt someone to replace his/her laptop+Blackberry combination? Quite possibly not. So enough with all the hyperventilation, already!

                          

Who better to look to for a first take on all this than the French? (Other than the Argentinians, but this weblog is called EuroSavant). For that we can go to L’Express’ correspondent in the States, Philippe Coste, and his blog-entry The governor and his labrynth. You might recall – although it was more than ten years ago – that the French, in particular, were mystified by the whole to-do around the Monica Lewinsky affair and President Clinton’s impeachment; powerful French politicians, all the way up to past President François Mitterand (and for that matter – who knows? – even president-at-that-time Jacques Chirac), had routinely kept mistresses on the side, but these had always been kept decorously hushed-up, in keeping with the French electorate’s acceptance of and lack of interest in such things.

Sure enough, here Coste mainly comes down on the side of Sanford; he makes it clear that he feels that the governor was unfairly hounded by the press:

I don’t know, but all that I see is a man in love, terribly in love. The State, the local newspaper, did not flinch at any sacrifice, dispatched to Argentina special personnel to trace the lady, and has just published their personal e-mails. I still dont know. . . . He only committed the crime of loving to the point of thinking for a while of just chucking everything for her.

He goes on, even as he describes the decision to publish those e-mails as “ignoble,” nonetheless to urge Sanford’s detractors to examine them again, as they will surely find “a human richness that contrasts as if by magic with the sticky and vulgar artifice, the virtuous poses American elected officials strike for the media.” He even undertakes to translate what he considers a particularly touching passage from one of Governor Sanford’s e-mails to his Argentine flame. (Hey, what the heck, the horse has long since left the barn since they’re all public now anyway.)

It’s all a bit touching; who in the US can you name who has similarly been willing to take Sanford’s side? (Not that the Governor can be expected to be appreciative; I understand that the very adjective “French” is a dirty word in the Republican lexicon.) But Coste probably goes to far with his sympathy, declaring at one point – referring to Sanford – that “this type has never played Father Virtue.” That of course is hardly true; it is largely the sheer hypocrisy that such behavior reveals in purported “family values” Republican elected officials like Sanford (or the philandering Senator Ensign of Nevada) that most offends many observers.

Poul Høj On the Case!

In view of this, it’s probably better to shift to a no-nonsense Northern European/Protestant media onlooker for a more iobjective view. Here it will come as no surprise to long-time readers of this weblog that I resort once again to Poul Høj, correspondent in the United States for Denmark’s Berlingske Tidende. Høj is all over the Sanford affair, coming out on BT’s on-line site with several articles dealing with various aspects, including one entitled Sanford took a hard line against other sex-scandal colleagues. That piece directly controverts the assertion by L’Express’ Coste mentioned above that Sanford had never been “holier-than-thou”; its lead: “Governor Sanford asks for forgiveness now, but he has never before been willing to forgive politicians who had flings.” And there’s another Sanford-related piece from him, a sort of nostalgic return to the ten “greatest hits” of American political sex scandals of times past, if you will, with the Big Dog naturally #1 on the list and a superb picture at the article’s very head of him pointing his finger at the press behind his presidential lectern (“I did not have sex with that woman!”) while the 1998-model Hillary glares sternly, with ruby-red pursed lips, from behind his right shoulder.

Actual analysis of Sanford’s situation Høj provides in his article Sanford affair is far from closed. He puts forward a number of interesting points:

• Can he even survive in his job? Consider that his fiercest critics in South Carolina seem to have been fellow Republicans, even before this latest adventure, with at the head of the pack one certain State Senator (whom Høj does not identify, but it’s Jake Knotts) who denounced to the press the governor’s “lies, lies, and more lies.”
  
• Who is this Maria in Buenos Aires? The press is certainly on her tail, as they already know her address, so it’s inevitable that we will learn much more about her and maybe even get to hear her side of the story.
  
• Høj phrases his next point rather awkwardly: “What was the anatomy in Argentinagate?” What he specifically means here is that it seems that Sanford, during the six days of his disappearance, deliberately lied to his staff about where he was – isn’t that somehow against the law?
  
• Records show that Sanford has had multiple occasions to visit Argentina before, ostensibly for public business. So did South Carolina taxpayers actually end up paying for what we can assume were those visits to his mistress?
  
• Finally, what sort of effect will this affair have on Republican electoral fortunes, particularly in view of the fact that it follows so closely on the Senator Ensign affair? Will it convince people that the Republican Party is rotten at the core?
  

                          

(Maybe I should have just stolen that title to make a more eye-catching heading for this blogpost, but I decided against it. By the way, the only other European columnist I can think of that I would want to watch specifically for any reaction to the election would be Agnès Giard, sex-blogger for France’s Libération, whom I have certainly covered before. But it seems politics generally lie outside of what she regards as her journalistic remit; the article she happened to post right after the election was actually entitled Declaration of love to the zombies. So there you have the link, although I’m not going to deal with that one, you’ll have to read the piece in French yourself. But no, rest assured that it has nothing to do with any politician, whether American or not.)

Why are you Europeans so interested in an American election? That’s the question Høi says he has been asked all the time, both by Americans he knew and those he didn’t but just happened to run across in a bar during time off from his reporting duties for Berlingske Tidende in the States – but in the latter case probably only after his new buddies finally noticed his accent and were moved to ask “Are you from France?”

That they are even asking this question – I mean “Why are you so interested?” – reveals (or confirms) something to Høi, namely “the American ambivalence towards the Old World.” And he goes on; check this out:

Americans are the newly-rich members of the family, who have nothing against posing with their giant, expensive house with newly-acquired art on the walls, but at the same time crave acceptance from the rest of the family, as they continue to doubt slightly their own table-manners.”

“Why are you so interested?”, then, according to Høi is a question that is trying to elicit two answers, often at the same time: 1) “Of course I’m interested, because everyone in the world is!” and 2) “Yes, I’m interested after all, believe it or not, for the following flattering reason . . .”

Alright then, but: So why are you Europeans so interested? Høi provides three reasons:

1. American elections are always compelling, by definition. No one, anywhere, who is plugged into the events of the day can afford to be indifferent. (In other words, answer #1 above – “Of course I’m interested . . .”) One really could not have been indifferent even to Clinton vs. Dole in 1996, claims Høi.
2. We’re interested because American elections are unusually decisive by European standards, and thus they enable Europeans “to live out our own political ideas” – yes, even more than they can “live them out” in their own, native elections! Høi certainly has an interesting point here since it’s true that elections in democracies running a parliamentary rather than presidential system of government together with some variant of proportional representation – such as is the case in his native Denmark, also in the Netherlands, Belgium, Germany and certain other European states (e.g. certainly Italy) – usually turn out to be a matter, as he puts it, of just “plus or minus ten percent,” i.e. results that bring only small changes to the make up of a governing coalition and/or government – such little payoff for all that trouble and expense! (But that is much less true in France, for example – a presidential system more similar to that in the US – or actually in the UK, which ostensibly is parliamentary but is in reality highly “presidential” in the impact of its national elections primarily because of its “first-past-the-post” electoral system, combined with what is in broad lines still mainly a two-party structure. Of course Høi is abstracting from these counterexamples in order to continue setting forth his point.) Whereas, on the other hand, the momentous potential for change that Obama’s election has brought about is obvious to all; as an appetizer, there are even reports already about how his transition team has identified 200 Bush-issued executive orders that he will be countermanding on 20 January or soon thereafter.
3. Finally, this election was especially interesting, Høi declares, frankly because over here in Europe the picture of the United States as one mighty racist society still endures. Indeed, Høi does not put it in such terms, but it’s quite likely he feels that Europe considers the US to be more racist than Americans do themselves. So naturally, contemplating the candidacy of Barack Obama, very many European felt, as Høi puts it, that “it would do the Americans a world of good to get a black president” (amerikanerne ville have rigtig godt af at få en sort præsident). And now they have.
   

                          

(Oh, and why French and Danish today? Just following this weblog’s general modus operandi, i.e. because I felt like it, although I also had a sense of not having discussed anything French or Danish lately and wanted to re-balance things a bit.)

However, I did run across an interesting piece by Johan Vardrup, the reporter sent to Denver by the well-respected Danish daily Berlingske Tidende, entitled Republicans hold happy hour for Hillary. From its very first line in the lede (“What won’t one do to fish for votes?”) you get a clear-cut sense of Vardrup’s attitude here: Damn, these Americans truly play some electoral hardball!

The subject here is the Happy Hour for Hillary staged on Monday by the Republican Party, staged in Denver of course, in fact just about as close as they could find a suitable place to the Pepsi Center where the Democratic convention is going on. And although it turned out that the eponymous guest of honor never showed up – despite the open offer of a free beer, as Vardrup notes – the point was really to offer a congenial forum for those of her supporters still not ready to support Obama, even to the point of considering voting for McCain (one of which, a certain Debra Bartoshevich, has already done a campaign ad for McCain, although Vardrup does not mention this in the article). In point of fact, Clinton through her spokesperson made it clear that she did not recommend that this “Happy Hour” be included in any Democratic delegate’s convention itinerary. Reactions that Vardup tracked on an on-line pro-Hillary discussion forum ranged from regarding this Republican move as a friendly gesture to calling it outright manipulation.

Man Who Knows Too Much = Presidential Loser

Moving on within the Danish press, I naturally called upon my favorite Danish observer of American affairs, Paul Høi and his weblog (off the Berlingske Tidende site) American Conditions. He hasn’t quite yet filed a reaction to Hillary’s speech yet – or indeed to the Democratic convention in any respect (wise man!) – but nonetheless his column of yesterday offers a “home run” of an insight into American politics. It’s entitled Stupidity, and perhaps it’s best to skip first to the very end of the piece for a summary of his point: “My rule of thumb: The man who knows too much is always eliminated in spy novels, and the same is true – whether one likes it or not – in American presidential elections.”

The thesis is simple: Americans want as their president not somebody manifestly above-average intellectually – i.e. superior to most of them – but rather about as smart as they are themselves. From Høi’s calculations, this explains the winner in (almost) all presidential elections since the Second World War, and it also explains the lamentable state to which the McCain-Obama campaign debate has already sunk at this relatively early point. Of course that debate need have nothing actually to do with the issues! It’s far more important for victory to succeed in painting your opponent as someone “elite” – “who eats brie and sips Chardonnay,” as Høi recalls was George H.W. Bush’s description of the cartoonist Gary Trudeau once his depiction in “Doonesbury” while he was president started to grate.

Høi is honest enough to admit that this viewpoint is hardly original with him. Early in his piece he refers to a 1999 article by Jonathan Chait advancing much the same argument in the New Republic, “Why America Loves Stupid Candidates,” which was accompanied by a crackerjack drawing of candidate George W. Bush with a dunce’s cap. But this pattern allegedly holds true all the way back to the 1948 surprise victory by Harry Truman over Thomas Dewey, with only one exception that Høi is willing to admit of, that being John F. Kennedy (who, we’ll recall, barely won the 1960 election and indeed might have gained crucial electoral support from the residents of several Chicago-area cemeteries). Jimmy Carter? He positioned himself as a simple peanut farmer from Plains, GA, while in 1992 Bill Clinton took care to don a working-class, “salt-of-the-earth” mantle (as Hillary did also this year, Høi admits). The 2000 election was naturally a classical manifestation of this syndrome: quite apart from any claims to have invented the Internet (generally manufactured by his detractors), just making clear to people how thoroughly he understood it was a grievous blow to Al Gore’s candidacy. (In this connection, here’s a bonus tidbit from the article: in Danish they actually have a word for “nerd,” – it’s nørd!) And we all have had almost eight years to get to know George W. Bush very well indeed, the second set of four largely thanks to the allegedy very “French” John Kerry.

And Your “Joe Sixpack” Winner Is . . .

So which of the current candidates is likely to benefit most from this underlying dynamic? Høi thinks it will be McCain, whom he terms clearly “the most anti-intellectual” of the two main candidates. True, true, McCain has appeared far more often on “The Tonight Show,” “The Daily Show,” etc. (not to mention in a movie), and is a far, far richer man than Barack Obama – but there you go again resorting to logic, my son, forgetting that we’re talking about American politics here! All of John McCain’s money really doesn’t enter into the equation, since according to Høi what matters is not finances per se but rather demonstrating a proper non-elitist attitude – i.e. that you’re just another “Joe Sixpack.” (Another linguistic bonus here: “Joe Sixpack” in Danish is mulde-Jens, from muld meaning “sod”!) The Obama campaign recently has belatedly recognized and started to fire back on this front, such as with the ads riffing off of John McCain’s inability to remember how many houses he and Cindy have, but Barack Obama might be fatally disadvantaged here – after all, he won scholarships to top universities, and even became editor of the Harvard Law Review. And so, as ever, the American electorate might again wind up with a president reflecting them most broadly – perhaps the president they truly deserve.

                          

The newspaper’s US correspondent Paul Høi lays out the razors-edge situation that we all know the 2004 presidential election now finds itself in, citing a recent opinion poll from Time magazine that puts the candidates dead-even at 45% support each. But rather more interesting to Høi is not the numbers themselves, but the trend: last week, says Høi, President Bush was leading by six percent in the opinion polls, now he is dead-even; last week voters viewed him as the attractive/engaging candidate (the Danish adjective is sympatisk), now that’s John Kerry. Høi even drags Newton’s First Law into the discussion (“a body in motion will remain in motion, unless stopped by an external force”) to make the point that, whatever Bush’s performance in that second debate, he did not stop or even deflect the electoral momentum John Kerry had gained from the first.

So, Høi asks: Why is it so hard for President Bush to prevail in these debates?

Oh, a couple reasons. “Most experts agree,” Høi reports, “that we are witnessing a president who is being pulled under by events, and who is forced to re-invent his entire electoral campaign on a dime.” The original plan was to run as the commander-in-chief, as the “war president,” but the continuing stream of bad news from Iraq has put paid to that strategy, not to mention the recent defections of certain of his subordinates from the “party line”: Paul Bremer, for one, but even Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld, who recently admitted that there was “no solid evidence” linking Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda.

Beyond that, the Bush campaign also suffers from considerations of style out of the debates so far. Høi quotes CNN commentator Aaron Brown to the effect that the average TV viewer, if s/he watched that first debate with the sound turned off, would have thought Kerry was the president from comparing posture and gestures between the two men. As for the second debate, with his antic, aggressive behavior in its first half, Bush drove away the female vote – or at least that’s what Høi quotes the editor of an (unnamed) Democratic-leaning magazine as asserting.

PREACHING TO THE CHOIR

More fundamentally, though, Høi sees Bush as making use of the debates solely to appeal to (and so solidify the support of) his core constituency – the Christian right, for example. I’ve seen other commentary to the effect that that was also Vice President Cheney’s aim in his debate. In contrast, Høi sees Kerry as trying to reach out to convince a broader audience, quoting him that “political labels don’t mean anything” in the current political climate – whether that’s objectively true or not. Kerry is much like Tony Blair in that respect, in this Danish writer’s opinion – or, for that matter, like Anders Fogh Rasmussen, the current Danish premier, who apparently is a fairly accomplished “reacher-outer” himself.

The entire article is clearly based on the assumption that Bush has lost the momentum in this election for good, and so will be headed back to Crawford, TX (or wherever) next January – thus, for example, the crass address “Bush” (no title, no nothing) in the headline. Any Danish commentator would take that attitude if he possible could; heaven knows, Berlingske Tidende is definitely on the Danish political right, so you can only imagine what more radical papers like Information would write (and maybe we’ll take a look at that, if something good comes up there). But even the Danish language must surely have its equivalent explanation warning against counting chickens before they are hatched.

                          

But that’s generally the same in them all; that’s boring. Let’s turn instead to the more-diverse side-articles, such as crack Berlingske Tidende political writer Paul Høi’s first-hand encounters with security in Boston-town (We’re Off to Boston, My Friend).

“It begins already in the airplane,” Høi reports in this “convention diary” – that stifling security. He has the misfortune to be assigned a seat in a row with an emergency exit-door, and so is handed an extra set of instructions about what to do, is told by the stewardess to read it and watched as he does so, and then is quizzed on what he has just read.

Høi had also drawn the assignment to cover the Democratic convention in 2000, in Los Angeles, and there was certainly security laid on there, but nothing like what he observes now. One hundred observation cameras outside the FleetCenter; the near-by subway station closed down, together with the highway downtown; Coast Guard cutters patrolling the harbor with their infra-red nightsights and divers; and helicopters and even F-16s circling watchfully overhead. And of course security dogs; Høi watches as a (female) delegate approaches a squad of three security-men with their bomb-sniffing hounds and gushes “They’re sweet! What are their names?” The response: “We can’t tell you that, ma’am. We’re trying to give the dogs a low profile.”

What with all the security, movement of any kind in the city is very difficult indeed. “This is hell,” Høi’s taxi-driver grouses one day. “I almost just want to go back where I came from.” “Where is that?” “Haiti. We got worse roads, and there are highway-robbers all over the place, but things still move along faster down there.”

BEACON HILL LOCKED DOWN

The heavy security naturally extends to the Kerry family mansion, located in Boston’s high-class Beacon Hill neighborhood, where Høi finds numerous four-wheel-drive vehicles on watch, black or dark-blue, their motors always running, manned by personnel “so voluminous that they [also] should carry a yellow license-plate.” He writes about how, at first, the Kerry neighbors were a bit annoyed about not even being allowed to have their groceries loaded from their car in front of their house. But they’ve gotten over all that now and forged a tight relationship with their guardians, sending out cookies and even whole meals to them. A few of the Beacon Hill ladies have even had specially-designed convention neckties made for them: in gold, silver, blue, green, and red (not separate ties; they’re the same ties, apparently displaying all these colors). “I suppose I should wear it at least once,” one anonymous agent remarked to the Boston Globe.

Finally, in case any one needs reminding of the fact, Høi recalls that both airplanes that slammed into the twin towers of the World Trade Center in New York originated from Boston’s Logan Airport, after security checks on their passengers that he describes as having been “more than usually liberal.” “Liberal”? Meaning “faulty,” yes? Does Høi realize what he is doing, choosing words like that?

FOREIGN GUESTS: BEWARE COUNTER-PRODUCTIVITY!

I hate to concentrate too much on one writer, but it seems that Paul Høi has already been rather busy in Boston, as he couples his “convention diary” of personal observations with an excellent treatment of the topic we touched upon in yesterday’s post, namely the foreigners in attendance, provocatively titled What Does Europe Need to Do to Get Kerry Elected? This time it’s not French representatives that are the star of the piece, but rather some visitors from Britain’s governing Labour Party. One of them, Martin Salter, says straight-out “I consider George W. Bush as a complete and absolute threat to world civilization, and the sooner he is kicked out the door, the better.” As Salter goes on to point out, he is hardly alone in this attitude among his fellow countrymen, who polls show favor Kerry by a margin of five-to-one (although, he admits, opinion is even more lopsided in countries such as Germany and France).

The thing is, as we saw yesterday in the determination of the Frenchmen in Boston to just keep their Frenchieness to themselves as much as possible, this sort of support from outside is a mixed blessing at best. And Høi does an excellent job of showing just why that is: Americans bridle at the idea of foreigners seeming to dictate to them who their president should be. He quotes that conservative radio paladin, Rush Limbaugh (heard by at least 20 million Americans each day): “Europeans don’t like Bush because they don’t like a strong America. That’s the truth, my friends. Bush is too strong for them. He won’t bow down and kiss their feet or try to come to a consensus with a band of elite, old-money-aristocrat European socialists who are only interested in dictating to us.” (“Old-money-aristocrat European socialists”? Whew – how about if, before we allow someone to pontificate about Europe and Europeans, we ask him or her first to demonstrate that he can locate these countries on a map?)

Høi ultimately concludes that, as rabidly anti-Bush as these Brits or any other visiting foreigners care to be, they’re only wasting their breath and flirting with the prospect of indeed becoming counter-productive in this way. As he quotes the commentator Sunder Katwala in The Observer (that’s a leading British newspaper), there are really only three foreigners who could influence the course of this presidential election:

• Osama bin Laden, who supposedly could ensure Bush’s re-election with some sort of pre-election terror attack. The worrying thing is, we can assume that that’s what he wants to do; “Bush is good for the Islamic cause,” maintains Katwala.
  
• Jacques Chirac, who could throw the entire body of Republican voters into deep confusion by endorsing Bush for re-election.
  
• And then (more seriously, folks) there’s Tony Blair, whose standing among Americans is such that he could greatly further the cause of either candidate with his endorsement. But Blair is taking care to remain studiously neutral – no matter what his Labour Party associates are getting themselves into now over in Boston.
  

SOME BUSH ANTI-ENDORSERS

Other than that, another article that caught my attention in the Danish press – in what you’ll recognize is likewise a humorous vein – is Anders Legarth Schmidt’s piece in Politiken, Michael Moore Invites Bush to the Movies. Yes, now that Fahrenheit 9/11 is opening (tomorrow, in fact) at the “Crawford Peace House” movie theater just down the road a spell from Bush’s Texas ranch, Moore has written the President a letter (posted on his website; in English, of course) about how glad he would be to see him there. After all, “you’ve got the funniest lines in the film!”

Finally, for those who might need reminding along these lines, Politiken features articles both about the forty-eight Nobel Prize winners who collectively endorsed Kerry for President in an open letter last month, and the twenty-six ex-diplomats and -military officers who acted similarly a few weeks before that (Diplomats and Officers: Vote Bush Out).

                          

Doctor Faustus of course refers to the immortal literary theme, from back in the European Middle Ages, of the man who sells his soul to the devil to gain superhuman powers, a theme treated most famously by Goethe and Christopher Marlowe. Here, Høi invokes Faust as a tale of the devil tempting man with an easy solution to what is otherwise a seemingly insoluble problem – but with punishment that comes later.

From the “Faust” stories, he writes, “the moral was clear and distinct: Man cannot control Evil. The control in fact goes in the other direction.” Similarly, Arroyo may think she has come up with the best solution for saving De La Cruz, who is the father of eight children, and has uncles and aunts and cousins, etc., all of whom have naturally been loud in calling for the Philippines to do what the militants demand in order to save his life. After all, those troops were scheduled to be re-deployed home soon anyway.

But terrorists do not show thanks or gratitude, Høi reminds us, and just because the troops will all be home soon does not mean, as he puts it, that Arroyo can then draw a line in the sand and declare “no more deals with me.” There’s nothing to stop hostages from being taken right there in the Philippines, or bombs exploding – or threatening to explode. For that matter: Has De La Cruz even been released unharmed yet?

COALITION SOLIDARITY STARTING TO CRACK

There is even less to stop further hostages from being taken in Iraq from the coalition forces there of various nations or their civilian countrymen, and it is the Philippine’s precedent of yielding to demands that makes this all the more likely. With its own troops still on the ground there, Denmark certainly has a right to complain, and Høi does a round-up of criticism for Arroyo’s action from other countries that are still active coalition members: Australia, the US, Japan, and South Korea, all of which have repeated their own stance that they do not deal with terrorists. Høi even cites anonymous sources in Washington who speak of the Philippines’ “stab in the back,” which is certain to cool relations between the two countries.

Such relations are already cool between the US and Spain, which Washington and several of its allies now regard even as a “deserter” nation because of the precipitate withdrawal of its troops from Iraq after last March 11′s multiple bombings in Madrid and the subsequent election of a new Spanish government. There, Høi states, the terrorists “bombed the elections and achieved what they wanted to achieve.” Let’s remember that that’s not a view about the Madrid bombings shared by all; as we saw in an earlier €S entry a few months back, some in the German press, at least, consider that the Spanish electorate threw out José Maria Aznar’s government back then for other reasons relating to those bombings, and/or perhaps for completely unrelated other reasons. But there’s clearly frustration among remaining coalition members, as one-by-one countries which have up to now stood in solidarity and contributed forces to Iraq now head for the exit door.

                          

What convinced me to bend the “rules” this way was what I found in cruising through today’s Danish press: a great piece in Berlingske Tidende entitled Rock’s Cabinet of Riddles. Writer Poul Høi has taken an inspired approach to the Michael Jackson controversy: yes, his case is certainly strange, but it isn’t the only oddity that has cropped up through the years from the world of rock music.

Getting by with a little help from his friends at Rolling Stone’s archives, Høi comes up with a list of seven other such “riddles.”

The total number of entries stands at eight, though, because he would be remiss not to lead off with a treatment of his leading inspiration:

1. Michael Jackson: Take your pick why he heads the list: his friendship with Bubbles the chimpanzee; his marriage with Lisa (though Høi spells it “Liza”) Marie Presley; the nose, which is about to fall off; babies who get swung off the edge of a high balcony in Berlin; 13-year-old boys who have proven themselves able to describe to prosecutors in detail what Høi terms Jackson’s “vital parts” (ædlere dele); etc. “Maybe he is more strange than the police will allow,” he hypothesizes.

(Important update: Michael Jackson has now seen the light and started to pump iron – so reports the Weekly World News. Well, I would hope so: Jacko has my same height – 5’11″ – and, at 120 lb., almost half my weight!)

2. Elvis visits Nixon. The year: 1970. Elvis, in the nation’s capital, decides to visit the President. It’s quickly arranged, and Nixon even bestows on the King of Rock ‘n Roll an FBI badge naming him “special narcotics agent.” The problem – as is clear from the Oval Office picture, and confirmed after the fact – is that Elvis is stoned out of his mind throughout.

3. Madonna and “Sex”: She may be writing and publishing children’s books these days, but back in 1992 Madonna had an entirely different sort of literary output. This was namely the photography-book “Sex,” made up of portrayals of the singer, nude, in various curious scenarios and situations. And her rationale: “My [something rude] is my temple.”

(I’m sorry I can’t do any better here; that quote is in Danish, and the “something rude” word is given only as “f…..” I’m not familiar enough with Danish scatology – I know, I’m supposed to be the expert – to know what that refers to. To my Scandinavian readers: Let me do without your help on this one, please.)

4. George Michael Caught in the Toilet: This was apparently when the singer, so to speak, “came out of the closet” – namely after the occasion of his arrest (in 1998, although Høi’s article neglects to give the year) in Los Angeles for perpetrating an “obscene deed” with an attendant at a public restroom. Unfortunately, that “attendant” happened to be an undercover policeman. (My other sources on the Net tell me that he went ahead and used a re-enactment of the scene to open his next music video.)

5. Whitney Houston’s Wedding: With Bobby Brown, naturally, which in Høi’s view led her downhill all the way ever since: to cocaine, arrests, scandals, and an apparent disinclination to eat anymore.

6. Jim Morrison as Exhibitionist: We’re back to ædlere dele here again. The Doors’ Jim Morrison did more than just lay his heart and soul out on the line during a concert in Miami on March 2, 1969. His willingness to “let it all hang out” led not only to a riot in the concert hall, but also to various charges relating to violation of public morals.

7. Thirteen as Lucky Number: Two rock ‘n roll greats get mentioned here: Jerry Lee Lewis (“the Killer”) and Stones’ bassist Bill Wyman, both of whom fell for thirteen-year-olds. (Whoa – shades of Jacko!) But wait, these were thirteen-year-old girls, and both gentlemen did the “decent” thing and married them. (At least eventually: Wyman waited until his sweetheart was actually nineteen to tie the knot; and that “knot” lasted a full 17 months further.)

8. Keith Moon’s Limo: Finally, Keith Moon of The Who, well-known as a wild man (during his life, that is, which ended in 1978). Of course, for him celebrating his 21st birthday was sure to be something extra-special (hey – from that day he could drink most places in the US!), and it was. On tour in Flint, Michigan in 1969, says Høi, he started drinking that day at 10:00 AM, and when his behavior resulted in the local sheriff being called, he commandeered a Lincoln Continental and drove it into the Holiday Inn’s swimming pool, resulting in a permanent ban of The Who from that hotel chain.

In point of fact, that was just one of many stories Høi could have chosen about The Who demolishing hotel rooms (just as they tended to demolish their drum sets and guitars on-stage at the end of appearances). Led Zeppelin were supposedly even worse, although they were kinder towards their musical instruments; where are they on this list? What’s more, my other Internet sources have Keith Moon born in London in 1947, meaning that he would have turned 22 in 1969, not 21.