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> Obama got a reception like he was the Pope on his first European trip. It spans more than just the Nobel committee. First not being Bush wrote a lot of check

by sobkas 4y ago

> Obama got a reception like he was the Pope on his first European trip. It spans more than just the Nobel committee. First not being Bush wrote a lot of checks he couldn't cash. People believed for some reason that he was leftist, and later discovered how much to the right, American "left" is. And American media also distorted a bit what was actually happening. Neither democratic nor republican media would show their beloved leaders(you can guess which media support which president) in bad light.

giobox 4y ago
> People believed for some reason that he was leftist, and later discovered how much to the right, American "left" is. What nonsense. That US Democratic Party politics often leans more right than many popular European parties on the left is not some modern post-Obama discovery, and was widely understood long before Obama's presidency. Literally read any political memoir or history by a left-leaning European politician who interacted with the US and Democratic party leadership prior to Obama and you will pick up a sense of this. I can accept arguments Obama may have been treated with much more interest and excitement than perhaps he warranted in European media at that time, but I see little evidence this was because his politics were misunderstood - Obama's policy positions were generally easy to articulate. I think a simpler explanation might well lie in the obvious historic nature of the event; he was the first black man to hold the office, and the first Democratic president after two terms of Bush. These facts alone are "newsworthy" by the standards of modern media. "leftist" is an absolutely terrible classification to use in any debate about politics, given its generally only ever used reductively and is almost devoid of any actual meaning.
- blahedo 4y ago
  But even here in the US, on both the left and the right, Obama was frequently painted as much more leftist than he ever ever actually was or claimed to be. Wishful thinking on both sides, I guess. Europeans that weren't following US politics exceedingly closely could be forgiven for being surprised at Obama's more-centre-right-than-expected policies even if they knew in general that the US Dems would be comfortable among the centre-right parties of Europe.

by sobkas 4y ago

giobox 4y ago

> People believed for some reason that he was leftist, and later discovered how much to the right, American "left" is. What nonsense. That US Democratic Party politics often leans more right than many popular European parties on the left is not some modern post-Obama discovery, and was widely understood long before Obama's presidency. Literally read any political memoir or history by a left-leaning European politician who interacted with the US and Democratic party leadership prior to Obama and you will pick up a sense of this. I can accept arguments Obama may have been treated with much more interest and excitement than perhaps he warranted in European media at that time, but I see little evidence this was because his politics were misunderstood - Obama's policy positions were generally easy to articulate. I think a simpler explanation might well lie in the obvious historic nature of the event; he was the first black man to hold the office, and the first Democratic president after two terms of Bush. These facts alone are "newsworthy" by the standards of modern media. "leftist" is an absolutely terrible classification to use in any debate about politics, given its generally only ever used reductively and is almost devoid of any actual meaning.

blahedo 4y ago
But even here in the US, on both the left and the right, Obama was frequently painted as much more leftist than he ever ever actually was or claimed to be. Wishful thinking on both sides, I guess. Europeans that weren't following US politics exceedingly closely could be forgiven for being surprised at Obama's more-centre-right-than-expected policies even if they knew in general that the US Dems would be comfortable among the centre-right parties of Europe.