In Britain, America's staunchest ally in the war in Iraq [No, Australia was. Britain was #2 in "staunchness" – SCDB], a poll of 1,007 people taken last month for The Times of London, by the British polling company Populus, found support for Senator John Kerry over Bush by a margin of 56 percent to 22 percent. From America, a poll of people in nine nations conducted in March by the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press found that opinions of the president and, by extension, the United States, had plummeted across Europe since Bush took office.
In France, the poll found, Bush has an 85 percent negative rating; in Britain, 57 percent; in Germany 85 percent; and in Russia, 60 percent. (In the United States, meanwhile, the president has a favorable rating of 61 percent, the poll found.) "People say, 'I'm very frustrated that I can't vote in the U.S. elections, because these are the ones that affect my way of life more than anything else,'" Ken Dubin, a political scientist at Carlos III University in Madrid, said in an interview. [Which says something about the perceived meaninglessness of European elections, doesn't it? – SCDB]
... "The thing that Europeans cannot understand is how you can vote for a liar," said Peter Schneider, a German essayist and novelist. [This from the neighbor and staunch ally of France, where the only thing keeping Chirac out of prison is Presidential immunity. – SCDB] "Here is somebody who lies about something that leads to a war where tens of thousands of people's lives are involved." Nor are Europeans thrilled about the American values they feel Bush has encouraged, in which anti-Europeanism is applauded as a virtue, people boycott French wine to protest France's position on Iraq, and Kerry is ridiculed by Republicans for being able to speak French. [I don't recall ever seeing Kerry criticized for speaking French. However, I've seen considerable criticism of Kerry for speaking like the French, even though he was speaking in English. – SCDB]
"The idea that you have a leader of the U.S. who's not interested in listening to his allies is important in the way people perceive Bush," Guillaume Parmentier, director of the French Center on the United States at the French Institute on Foreign Relations, said in an interview. "He has a very simplistic view of the world which we find difficult to accept. In fact, that we find dangerous." [What Europeans really cannot understand is that those are exactly the reasons why Bush has remained popular in the US. – SCDB]
It's too bad for Kerry that it isn't European voters who will select the next President of the US, isn't it? Our stubborn insistence that only Americans may vote is yet another example of our contemptible unilateralism.
