CDR: Well, that's over. Heads up, America!

[Ken Brown]

OK you folks on the downwind side of the Atlantic, now your election is
over (even if you won't know the result for 3 weeks yet), can you take
your weather back?  We've had a month of egregious  rain and floods over
here and I'm sure it has to be your fault somehow. 5 tornadoes in Sussex
(my home county) one of them even killed people. These things just don't
happen in England. It must be the Americans fault. Somehow. It wasn't
like this in my day...

What did happen to Jim Bell? Just a search or worse? You were all
posting about it then got side-tracked into polling hours. Did he phone
Declan? 


Ken Brown 




As a foreigner (from your USan POV) far be it from me to try to make any
suggestions about your internal politics but I never was any good at
temptation so...

if the recount (surely there has to be one?) & postal votes in Florida
go Bush's way you may have removed the last obstacle to Hillary becoming
president or VP next time round :-)

You guys have political dynasties now. Like they do in India and places
like that. (Was Gore Vidal named for Al's grandad?) Chelsea vs. Jeb
junior in 2020?

And why are both presidential candidates such bores?

The received wisdom is that politics at that level is all about
advertising, TV, good looks, soundbites and star quality.   Doesn't this
contest disprove that? Both main candidates look really, really boring
on TV (though George W "Too many of our imports come from overseas" Bush
sometimes says some amusingly stupid-sounding things. But then so did
General Haig :-(

Thinking over the men who you've had as president in my
TV-watching-lifetime, only two (Kennedy & Clinton) had anything
approaching "star quality" on TV. Ford, the older Bush & Carter came
over as pretty normal (dull in one case, likeable in the others),
Johnson sort of weird, and Nixon actually repulsive. Some Americans tell
me that Reagan played well on TV but to us Europeans that just goes to
show how strange Americans can be.  Over here, he looked scary. Of
course I've no idea what any of these people are like in real life -
just how they seem through the media.

Same goes with knobs on for our UK Prime Ministers. Only the present
incumbent & Harold Macmillan (who you guys will never have heard of)
could have been called good-looking,  & MacMillan was past it by the
time he got to be PM.  Wilson, Heath, Callaghan, Major - none of them
were ever going to get to be a chat show host.  Thatcher was  (& is)
almost universally hated, even by those who voted for her. 

Maybe that is why most of your states voted dam near 50-50 for each
candidate.  Same policies on most things that count, and where they
differ nobody believes them anyway. (Is Bush really saying, as his Tory
acolytes over here in Britain are, that you can cut taxes *and* increase
pubic spending? Does anyone take that seriously enough to factor it in
to their voting behaviour?). And neither of them comes over as more than
a worthy 3rd-generation public servant. (What we call "the Great and the
Good" - the sort of people that get appointed onto commissions and
boards and inquiries)  With nothing to choose between them, votes just
came out at random.

Certainly that is how Labour got in in UK. Everyone hated the Tories.
Labour promised - in writing - to carry on Tory policies on most things
(they even adopted the Tory budget for 2 years). So the only issue was
that Labour looked like the nice guys. Landslide.