Demagogue

It's no surprise that most people in most countries thing Dubya's election was a bad thing. They had a dim view of him before the election, after all.

But what has changed is that negative feelings toward the Preznit "are generalizing to the American people who reelected him."

I wrote something about this on the old Demagogue when it became clear that no one in the administration was going to be held accountable for Abu Ghraib. Having lived in Japan, I have some conception of the effectiveness of ritual (figurative) suicide by top executives when something goes wrong. It signals that the problem is regarded as serious. Had Bush fired Rumsfeld, it would have sent a message to the world that Bush regarded torture by American soldiers as a serious problem. His failing to hold anyone accountable sent a quite different messaage and moved the ball into the voters' court: we could fire Bush to show that we disapproved of the things that had repulsed the world, or we could keep him and appear to ratify all of it.

Some folks have pointed to polling data showing that majorities are actually unhappy with a lot of what Dubya wrought in his first term, even if on balance a slim majority voted for him over Kerry. But the message the world takes is that we approve of everything: the war in Iraq, the indefinite incommunicado detentions at Guantanamo, the torture, the insulting of old allies, the gutting of international treaties--all of it. Hence a Dutch friend's response when I asked him the other day what his friends think of Americans right now: "We think you're a bunch of fruitcakes who have completely lost contact with reality."

Particularly after the disputed election of 2000 and the dramatic effect of 9/11, we had plausible deniability before November 2. There was a dichotomy between foreigners' negative views of the U.S. government and their generally positive (though declining) feelings toward America in general. But when we passed on the chance to dump the band of idiots who perpetrated the disaster that is Iraq, it became much harder for foreigners to regard Bush as an aberration who didn't reflect the real goodness of the country.

See the chart here