If Joe Wurzelbacher had already become famous two weeks ago, I’m sure this would have been among the questions I faced when I was recently interviewed by two German-speaking media outlets (the German public radio station WDR and Austria’s daily Der Standard) for their respective stories capturing an ex-pat German’s perspective on the US presidential campaign.
It is widely known that Europeans find US politics half amusing, half alarming. Germans, in particular, not in the least because of their history, mock the need for spectacle and find the “framing” of the political discussion to the expense of a near-total absence of substance rather concerning: how an ordinary plumber from Ohio could receive so much prime airtime and become the last straw in a candidate’s failed campaign, will therefore leave most of them dazzled. Let alone “drill, baby, drill” and Sarah Palin.
At the same, Germans are completely in awe of Obama, and even the notoriously cynical SPIEGEL was inspired to suggest more “excitement in German politics” after the senator’s speech in front of 200,000 Berliners. Germans are also fascinated with grassroots politics and field campaigning to the extent that they are important in the US. No German political party would ever allow more or less unvetted volunteers to make phone calls under their name. There is no “phone banking” in Germany. There is also no real-time focus group barometer during TV debates that spikes when either of the candidates utters the word “tax cut.” And there are no “fact checkers” who check the accuracy of each campaign’s allegations (but remain unchecked themselves, as the Economist pointedly remarks).
While the political culture gap seems to be widening, citizens on both sides of the Atlantic share similar economic woes. The initial Schadenfreude about the implosion of US greed has given way to deep concern about the domestic reverberations of the financial crisis. As Newsweek countered, Germans are sitting in “Glashaeuser” and shouldn’t throw stones. The German government just slashed its growth forecast for 2009 to 0.2 per cent. Klaus, the plumber, might lose his job under these dire circumstances and is probably equally concerned about tax hikes as Joe (although he may have reason to, and Joe, as we know, does not actually under a President Obama). But style and tone are different. If Klaus had said on German TV that he was not willing to apologize anymore for his country and was also in favor of closing all borders, this would have caused a scandal of national proportions. In the US, it was just seen as yet another piece of main street lore, an unexpected narrative of a campaign rich with narratives.
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