LeMonde: American Elections, Cause for Hope and for Disappointment

[Bluebear]

The American presidential election campaign is disappointing. Not because of the people running. On the contrary, they are rich, impressive and truth be told, they are far more thoughtful than those who have run in Europe lately. And not because Mrs. Clinton herself will have to withdraw. We’re sorry, but seen from France, it’s hard to see the difference between the two Democratic candidates.

Disappointing because it’s nowhere near over. Not yet they say. There are six months until November and it’s possible that the content of the candidates’ programs may again become important in a race that today is being played out on the basis of age, color or sex. But given the way things are going and because the decisive states are in the old rust belt (from Pennsylvania to Wisconsin), one fears that the battle will continue on its current bad track - that of populism.

When it came time to win over blue collar voters, Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama sank into outbidding one another on the issue of protectionism. And they railed against the free trade agreement with Canada and Mexico: it’s a factor in outsourcing. John McCain, long silent on economic issues - that’s not his area of expertise - took the floor to propose cutting federal gas taxes this summer to relief U.S. households. And alas, Mrs. Clinton has upped the ante on this proposition which is 1,000 percent demagoguery.

This disappointment is a measure of the hope, which is great: to see America reinvent a model of a united society for the 21st century. Americans “want to do nation-building in America,” summarizes Thomas Friedman, a columnist for The New York Times . “We are not as powerful as we used to be because over the past three decades, the Asian values of our parents’ generation - work hard, study, save, invest, live within your means - have given way to subprime values.” The Americans dream of putting an end to the long drift toward selfishness, social injustice, the poor quality of the infrastructure and the restriction of civil rights, of which the Bush era was the paroxysm.

http://themoderatevoice.com/society/hypocrisy/19562/american-elections-cause-for-hope-and-for-disappointment/#more-19562