Welcome to this week’s delve into European coverage of the US elections. Links to non-English sources go to GoogleTranslate versions, whereas the excerpts below have been humanly translated. Messages about malformed requests can be cleared by clearing cache and cookies a lot of the time.
I’ve decided not to bother with the debate coverage. I read a few pieces which were suitably outraged and so forth, but they offered nothing you haven’t already read in a US organ. In fact, most of the below is on-the-ground reportage (including profiles of campaign figures occasioned by a campaign appearance).
We’ll start instead with Matthias Kolb in Süddeutsche Zeitung talking about Michelle Obama. It’s a two-page article, and clicking on the red rectangle at the end of the first page will take you to the second.
Nobody is more valuable to the Democrats than the popular First Lady. Her performance in Arizona shows how Michelle Obama inspires people….
She appeals to young people. Unlike Clinton, Michelle Obama is very popular with the Millennials. "She is believable and where we are, from the Disney Channel to the social networks," says 23-year-old Ashley Norwood. That's right: for her brand @FLOTUS (First Lady of the United States) Obama's team has an excellent social media strategy - and that includes "Carpool Karaoke" singing with Missy Elliott and James Corden.
Because they know that many young voters find both Clinton and Donald Trump terrible and are thinking of voting for the Libertarian Gary Johnson or the Green Jill Stein, Michelle Obama speaks plain language in Phoenix. "Here comes the truth. If you vote for someone other than Hillary, you are helping her opponent. I want you to think for a minute: how will it feel to wake up on 9 November and experience that?"
It’s safe to say Herr Kolb has become a big fan of Michelle.
In Dagens Nyheter, Martin Gelin has an awesome article profiling Chelsea Clinton. It’s massive and the Googlish is pretty good, so this is only a tiny sample:
Her entire conscious life has been marked by this very contradictory picture of her parents - Bill and Hillary Clinton have spent the last three decades in the US national spotlight. She lives in the US where her mother has been voted the country's most admired woman fourteen years in a row and where her father is the most popular living ex-president. But she also lives in a country where her parents exposed to more hatred than any other politicians in America's modern history.
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But behind Chelsea Clinton’s low-key image is a professional background characterized by high ambitions. It is a record that hardly precludes a political career for herself in the future. She has a doctorate in philosophy from Oxford University, has taught at Columbia University and had well-paying jobs at the consulting firm McKinsey, the hedge fund firm Avenue Capital, and the media company NBC. In recent years, she has mainly worked with the Clinton family's foundation, but she has also found time to write two books (the second comes out next year) and sits on the board of a dozen organizations and businesses.
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In Iowa, I get a rare chance to ask a couple of questions of Chelsea Clinton. She is surrounded by two Secret Service guards who restlessly look around for suspicious characters, but of course she manages to appear relatively relaxed. She is dressed casually in jeans and a t-shirt with "Making history", a reference to Hillary Clinton becoming America's first female president. In our brief interview after the campaign meeting, Chelsea mentions among other things, a visit to Sweden she did with Hillary when she was 13 years old.
“It was the first time I went to Stockholm. I went with my mother, in 1993, when she was working on health care reform in the White House and wanted to study how your health care system worked. My strongest memory is that I was bitten by a goose. We were on some kind of hill and there was a flock of geese, and one of them bit me. But it was a nice memory in the end - everyone who took care of me was so incredibly warm and nice to me,” she says.
Let’s now pay a visit to Danville, VA, from where Christophe Deroubaix reports in l'Humanité:
Let's start with Danville. The city, which hosts the largest tire production unit for the trucks multinationals use, has a poverty rate of nearly 25%. The paradox has not escaped John Gilstrap, elected mayor in 2014. "We talk about Goodyear of Danville, but this is in fact a regional facility,” he says in his Southern accent. Guys sometimes come from far away. Most live in Pittsylvania County, outside the city. However, the plant, with the activity it creates, is essential for our economic revitalization.
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The population decreases. Its composition evolves. In 2015, African Americans accounted for, according to the US Census Bureau, nearly 50% of the population, whites 46.7%. Per capita income is half that of the State of Virginia. Politically, Danville is "blue", the color of the Democratic Party. Barack Obama received 60% of votes in 2012 and Hillary Clinton, with her hegemony among black voters, crushed Bernie Sanders, with 80% of votes.
In Pittsylvania County with 63,000 residents, the figures are both a little better ... and very different. 78% of residents are white. The same proportion are property owners. Per capita income is one-third higher than in the city. It is "red" country, the color of the Republican Party. Red Trump even. The billionaire won 50% of votes of the Grand Old Party (GOP). It’s the same story in the other six counties - three in Virginia, three in North Carolina - that surround Danville. Angry red, white voters of the Republican Party. Not necessarily because of the economic crisis: its inhabitants are less victims than Danville. But angry against almost everything else. This phrase is a lot more full of meaning than it seems: Shirley, born in Danville but who preferred to retire to a small village an hour's drive away, says: "The world has gone mad. We are close to the end. "
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A few hundred meters from the town hall, Emma Edmunds finishes installing her exhibition at the Danvillian Gallery. She, a white journalist and historian, presents a gallery of portraits of figures, black and white, from the civil rights movement. "Fifty years later, I am struck by how much we are still divided. Everyone looks askance. The civil rights movement brought together people of different colors and different backgrounds for a just cause. Is it too much to ask that we learn the lessons of history? "
Answer: November 8th.
In the Berner Zeitung, Thomas Spang visits the border area in AZ.
No-one in Arizona takes Donald Trump's announcement about building a wall on the border with Mexico seriously. Not even those who are voting for him.
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"I do not know what would be beautiful about a wall," says the 52-year-old coordinator of the organization Human Borders, which maintains a network of drinking water stations in the remote borderland in the south-west of the USA. Four times a week, Joel Smith rattles off in his pick-up truck with 48 blue water tanks, which have saved the life of countless migrants.
For Joel, Trump's promised wall along the 2000-mile border is a symbol that "makes no one safer in Iowa or Ohio." The loudest "Build the Wall" Trump supporters are in the states which have hardly any immigration and are far from the border.
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Rancher John Ladd (61) does not think much of vigilantism, but has long lost faith in Washington. Since a cartel drug trafficker his school friend and fellow rancher Robert Krentz in 2010, the snout-bearded cowboy never leaves his house near the border crossing Noca without radio and pistol.
He tries to avoid any direct confrontation. … His land borders on Mexican territory. "We need someone to put an end to political correctness and finally do something." That's exactly what he promises himself from Donald Trump.
The problem lies for the cowboy in the "bribery" of the system. "Republicans want cheap work, Democrats cheap votes and Americans cheap tomatoes". His solution: a guest worker program and harsh consequences for illegal immigrants.
Even rancher Ladd does not think much of a wall. "I do not believe Trump really wants to build one." That is "symbolically meant." More important are border guards. As long as they aren’t there, there will continue to be deaths.
I actually think that line from Ladd about who wants cheap what is a rather neat encapsulation of the issue. (All right, I know it’s a lot more complicated than that, but it does hit one essential truth at least.)
Over the last few weeks, I’ve quoted some things from the Europe Goes US project, and there are a whole load of fun things there this week. Best of all, I’ve finally found the version at the Tribune de Geneve which has them all in English, so you can go and browse them for yourselves. There are meetings with a bunch of Hillary voters who work in the brothels of Carson City, Ufologists in Rachel, NV (where it takes two hours to drive to vote, so they’re not bothering), Trump hotel workers in Las Vegas, how the Orlando community has come together since the nightclub massacre, and people lining up on the first day of early voting in Savannah, GA —and those are just the highlights.
I should warn that the TdG site keeps counts, so it may start saying you’ve used up your free allowance. Deleting cookies from the tdg.ch domain may well allow you to continue, if you’re still of a mind to do so — as you very well could be.
In Herald Scotland, Alison Rowat speculates about how Trump and his followers will react to defeat:
There is less than a month until the election. If the Trump campaign is getting hot and bothered about the poll at present, what will the temperature of his supporters be come November 8, and how will that manifest itself?
No-one knows exactly how many Trump supporters there are (remember, as with all polls, nobody knows anything) but we are not talking one man and his dog here. In a poll for Politico/Morning Consult, 73 per cent of Republicans surveyed reckoned the election could be “stolen” from Mr Trump. If those supporters believe what he says, that their votes are not worth the paper they are punched on, are they likely to shrug their shoulders and think better luck next time? Judging by the vox pops in the Trump rallies, no.
There is another way a Trump defeat could play out other than in ugly scenes at polling booths and afterwards. In this scenario, Mr Trump’s candidacy is seen as one of the greatest marketing campaigns of modern times in which the product being punted is the man and his various enterprises.
...
If either scenario happens, a new media empire being created by Mr Trump, or a huge expansion of an already existing right-wing outlet, it might be good for media diversity, but it is going to be very bad news for Mrs Clinton.
During her husband’s presidency she was quick to blame his woes on a “vast right-wing conspiracy”. If Mr Trump’s media dreams, should they exist, come to pass, Mrs Clinton will be challenged every step of the way, on everything.
Those crazy times of the 1990s, when the Clintons were under siege over everything from Whitewater to Monica Lewinsky, could look like a day at the beach.
Una Mullally in the Irish Times says:
Outside a bar in Brooklyn after the third and final presidential debate, two young women digested what had just happened. “We apologise on behalf of America,” they said to me, the dramatic nature of the statement cut with absolute sincerity. It appears that many Americans, grappling with what Trump has become, the type of ludicrous dystopia he pedals, and his denigration of American politics, just want this whole sorry episode to be over. But hoping that Trumpland will simply disappear come November 8th is wishful thinking. There have always been dramatic divides across American society, geography, and politics, and what Trump has done is driven a wedge between such chasms, driving things further and further apart until these versions of America have become so polarised that an existential crisis has filled the gaps. How can America come back from what has happened throughout this campaign?
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We don’t yet know whether Trump will in fact not accept the result of the election. But what we do know is that his constant and baseless assertion that the election is rigged and therefore the result and the entire American democratic process is a bunk will appeal to every crackpot conspiracy theorist, every tinfoil hat-wearing rage-filled person, everyone who thinks America is in fact on the brink of a civil war, everyone who thinks a race war is the way to “take their country back”, everyone who is waiting for the rapture or sees things in biblical terms of good versus evil. There are those who hear these dog-whistles turned wolf-whistles and interpret them as a literal call to arms, validation for militia-forming, political assassinations or coups.
Unsurprisingly, as Contenius has found, Vzgliad takes a different line. This does mention the debate, I’m afraid, but it’s only in passing:
“Trump is Preparing a Maidan for Clinton”
Putin has became one of the most important subjects in the campaign, and in the third debate it was the name of the Russian president that evoked the most color and emotion.... The former Secretary of State has endlessly reproached Trump for his … “love” of Putin. In the debate she said it straight and clear: Trump is a foreign puppet....
Clinton claimed that Putin is behind the wikileaks disclosures, though it is clear that this is just campaign rhetoric, and she doesn't really believe it. But … in the United States such charges are not taken lightly: a lot of Americans seriously believe them.... Others accept Trump's characterization of Clinton as "bad" and "a liar." Whoever wins will immediately start to settle scores with the other....
Clinton is the candidate of the establishment.... Even many prominent Republicans refuse to support Trump.... The interventionists, globalists, and Atlantists are for Clinton; individualists, and the nationally oriented business elite, are for Trump. After the elections, the time will comes to clarify the relationship between these two groups....
A Clinton victory can only give the establishment a brief respite. It fully understands that the protests will only grow over the next four years, and a "new Trump" (or even the Donald) will inevitably come to power in 2020....
If Trump wins, the war on the establishment will begin November 9th …. President Trump will try to tie the hands and feet of Congress (even though he is a Republican), causing public protests and a campaign of defamation in the press. It will lead to impeachment. Naturally, Trump will defend himself and try to counterattack. A Trump victory is unlikely, but should it happen it is hard to imagine what might happen in Washington. The easiest option for the establishment would be to just kill the president-elect, even before his inauguration.
Trump long since crossed the Rubicon - and those who think that if he is defeated he will be willing and able to return to his pre-political life are profoundly mistaken. Firstly, he does not want to, and secondly, even if he did, he would not be left alone by "the Washington machine...." The establishment will not miss the opportunity to punish "the offender of conventions." And, significantly, they will need to act so as to discourage others.
So Trump has nothing to lose. Because of this, his statement that he has not yet decided whether to recognize the election results is perfectly logical....
A Washington Post article this week … entitled "Putin hopes to foment protests in the United States in the Eurasian style...," speculates that the Kremlin, wanting to avenge the Bolotnaya Square protest and the color revolutions, is trying to foment a Maidan against Clinton. This fits perfectly into the general, insane anti-Trump propaganda during this election, and it has real practical significance,.. because it highlights the possible scenario after 8 November.
If Clinton is declared the winner, but Trump does not recognize the outcome and organizes protests … he will immediately be denounced as a Russian agent. You think this is absurd? But he has already been called a puppet, so this is only a small additional step. Already, Americans are being told that Russia is interfering in their elections, hacking the Democratic Party servers and helping Trump.... In the event of protests – some "Occupy the White House" movement, or a "march of outraged citizens" on Washington – they will only say that Putin is behind it.
Norway's Aftenposten has a piece by Kjetil Hanssen and Steinar Dyrnes which suggests that Trump may not have run the nastiest ever Presidential campaign:
"Murder, robbery, rape, adultery and incest will be openly taught and practiced if Thomas Jefferson is elected," wrote the Connecticut Courant in September 1800 on what would happen with Jefferson in the White House.
"The earth will be soaked in blood, and the nation will be black with crimes", it went on.
There were also rumors that Jefferson fathered children by slave Sally Hemings - and Adams supporters used the phrase "Mr. Jefferson’s Congo Harem."
Jefferson won anyway. He thus became third president and now ranks as one of the all-time greats.
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During the War of 1812 the then General Jackson had ordered the execution of eight men accused of treason. This emerged in election attacks against him. Under the heading "Some of General Jackson's bloody infamous activities" eight coffins and the names of those executed were shown
When Jackson won the election, his followers stormed to the White House and battered their way inside. President Adams had to escape out of a back door.
On the other hand, there are some concerns about what Hillary might do after the election. Rupert Cornwell in The Independent:
So Hillary the hawk let loose on a turbulent world crying out for decisive American leadership? Maybe, but maybe not.
Most certainly she will want to be more assertive. It’s hard to deny that Obama’s rationalism that borders on passivity has raised doubts among some of Washington’s traditional allies about whether, if push came to shove, the US would be there for them. Power lies in the perception of a readiness to use it, and in that sense American power has indubitably been reduced – at a moment when a changing world was hastening the process anyway.
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In the US, the interventionist pendulum has swung, from the comparative caution of the first Clinton era to the George W Bush administration’s embrace of “preventive war”, that led to the unprovoked invasion of Iraq in 2003. Now it’s swung back. The Iraq disaster still shapes public opposition to US ground involvement elsewhere in the Middle East, and there’s no sign attitudes will change any time soon.
The chaos in Syria and Libya, and the replacement of bad by even worse in Egypt, has only hardened that mindset. Clinton herself has repeatedly said she opposes US “boots on the ground” in the Middle East. She may be wise to do so – but by taking the option of direct military intervention off the table, she has reduced America’s potential leverage.
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All this argues against the US plunging into Syria: a war against Bashar al-Assad means war against Russia. And it explains why there is a limit to what may be done about Russian encroachments in next-door Ukraine – and why everyone is so fearful of where Russian intimidation of the Baltic states, once parts of the Soviet Union, may lead. So Clinton the hawk or Clinton the pragmatist? My guess is the latter, albeit adorned with a few feathers and talons.
Of course, this isn’t necessarily the Russian view. Contenius brings us this from Vesti:
“Clinton's Big Weakness: Control of the Nuclear Button”
In the U.S., there is a story told about an event in 1979: early on the morning of November 9th, national security adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski received a call telling him that 2000 Soviet missiles had been launched at the United States. He had three minutes to inform the President, who then had four minutes to decide what to do. Ten U.S. aircraft were already in the air. But the U.S. president wouldn't wake up. Finally, Brzezinski realized that it was a false alarm, triggered by a simulation program. In the U.S. this story is dismissed as a joke; but laugh if you will, in another 30 seconds Washington could have mistakenly unleashed a nuclear war.
After the last debate, Americans are no longer laughing. Live in front of an audience of 70 million people, Clinton, to the amazement of many, for the first time in U.S. history confirmed officially that the president has only four minutes to react. "Ultimately, when it comes to nuclear weapons, when the president gives the order, the order must be carried out,” said Clinton. “It takes only about four minutes from giving the order to the launch of nuclear weapons. And that's why ten people who have carried this terrifying responsibility took the unprecedented step of publicly stating that this authority should not be entrusted to Donald Trump."
Clinton was trying to strike a painful blow against her opponent, but the main victim in this debate was her. American nuclear security experts assert that the ex-Secretary of State revealed to the world information of strategic importance....
In a poll of former U.S. military and intelligence personnel, all responded with one voice: this information is not intended for the public, and its disclosure in professional circles is possibly a violation of the official secrets act....
The information that Clinton revealed has been confirmed by the experts: there are 4-5 minutes from the president's decision to the point of no return.... And now, with two weeks until the election, Americans must decide whether or not to trust a person who neglects national security in order to once again kick her competitor.
I’ll finish with a few pieces which attempt to see something of the bigger picture.
“Sex and politics” is an intriguing headline, and José María Carrascal’s article turns out to be excellent, although the Googlish is quite hard going.
The issue, however, is not exclusive to the story that will define the US presidential elections in 2016, but goes much further, to rethink one of the problems which affects not just this country, but the whole world: the position of women in the twenty-first century, which has begun so tumultuously. And yes, that too is big.
We believed that the matter had been settled and sorted out by the "cultural revolution" of the sixties and seventies of last century, one of whose main chapters was "women's liberation".
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How do you fight, how do you eliminate these attitudes from the days when men went with a spear in search of food while the woman stayed in the hut taking care of the children and the garden that would provide enough to eat if the male master returned home empty-handed? Despite high levels of education, despite a lot of culture, with many truths, starting with the "weaker sex" which is not as weak as we think. For a start, they are much more resistant to pain than the "stronger sex": if we men were to bring children into this world, mankind would end in two generations. Progress has been made in eliminating those stereotypes presenting women as nervous, impulsive, likely to make mistakes at times of danger, from which the heartthrob rescues them in movies, comics and even serious novels. But it lasts subliminally in the most diverse aspects of life, like the first thing the defense attorney in a rape trial asks about is what dress was being worn by the victim, or that women earn less than men …. doing the same job.
That this type of discrimination has emerged as a major theme at the end of the US presidential elections we owe to Donald Trump, our only debt to him. Good, and he shot himself not in the foot, but in the head, assuming the bullet doesn’t bounce.
In the Herald Scotland, Catriona Stewart takes up the theme.
While it’s heartening to hear all these right-wing Republican men speak out against their presidential candidate’s horrifying attitude to women, it would be far more satisfying to hear them speak about women as people. Just people, deserving of the same rights and safe passage through the world regardless of gender.
A certain section of men seem only able to relate to women as being somehow an extension of them - as these mothers, sisters and wives. Interestingly, you never hear them referring to women as friends.
What about those of us who don’t have any men in their lives? I have no husband, father or brother to be affronted on my behalf so what for me?
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Michelle Obama said on Thursday in a speech at a campaign rally: “Too many are treating [Trump’s actions] as just another day’s headline, as if our outrage is overblown or unwarranted, as if this is normal, just politics as usual.”
My chum would presumably not call Mrs Obama anti-social - she’s the President’s wife, after all. She’s also a successful, intelligent, articulate person in her own right.
And how refreshing it would be to know men think of women in those terms. As people, just, and not an annexe of themselves.
A lot of people have attempted to explain the rise of Trump by reference to the failings of globalization, racism and all sorts of other things.
Hannes Stein in Die Welt thinks it’s even simpler. People are stupid.
How could it come to this? Even if he loses the election in November, how could Donald Trump get even close to the White House? And why has a left social democrat like Bernie Sanders , who raves about the revolutions in Cuba and Nicaragua, as if there had never been Stalinist terror there, creamed off so many votes in the primaries, especially among young people?
One answer is, many Americans do not know better because they can not know better. According to a study by the University of Pennsylvania in 2014, one-third of respondents had never heard of the separation of powers.
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A New York Times reporter interviewed a college student to see if he was not afraid to vote for a third-party candidate, because the scenario of the year 2000 could be repeated when Ralph Nader in Florida took so many votes from Al Gore that George W. Bush ended up winning the election.
The student’s response: "Ralph who?” He had obviously never heard of that election, which is the trauma of the American liberals today. He had not forgotten the historical lesson; He had never learned it.
Stupid, stupid Amis. Every educated European knows that the people on the other side of the Atlantic are a stupid lot, and looks down his nose.
However, it does not look much better in Germany. The research association SED-Staat at the Free University Berlin [did] a study which shows that 40 percent of young people do not know what the principal difference between democracy and dictatorship is.
Every second person has doubts about whether the Nazism was totalitarian; and only half believe the Federal Republic to be a democracy. About half the Germans also do not know what happened on 13 August 1961. (Little hint: a certain construction was erected which was not very nice.) Of the people under 30, only a third knew what happened that day in August.
This lack of general education covers all sectors of society in Germany as in America.
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Are we turning into historical mayflies, who live for the day and have no past? Are we going to forget the painful experiences on which our civilization is based?
Are we trusting that everything is going wonderfully, as long as our children do their math homework properly? Then the democracies of the West have no future.
It’s a long and somewhat depressing read, but at least to those of us who didn’t specialize in math and science at school, it offers a way of maybe doing something about the culture of ignorance.
Which starts with electing Hillary.
Now it’s your turn to entertain me.