If I were a US voter I'd be voting for Barack Obama on November 4. Why? (a) Because voting Democrat would be my default position as an American citizen, just as I dutifully vote Labour in this country every time. (b) Because I think Barack Obama is a better candidate than John McCain. (c) Because the symbolism of a black president would have great significance for the progress of American society. And (d) because it might help to restrain the more kneejerk tendencies within global Guardianista opinion, for which all the world's problems have either been created or aggravated by George W. Bush in particular and US Republicans in general; the fact that the problems will still be there might bring a degree of sobriety into dinner-party, liberal-media and locked-leftist discussion, though there will inevitably be parts of this body of thinking, the more crazed parts, that nothing at all will ever reach to dissuade from hostility towards the hated US hegemon.
I would not, however, be voting for Obama for the reason evinced today by Jonathan Freedland. Making the same kind of mistake as he made four years ago, Jonathan thinks that the US electorate owes it to pro-Obama opinion elsewhere in the world to reject McCain. If they do not, he 'predict[s] a deeply unpleasant shift'. Jonathan also says that he fears this shift. But he seems to endorse it nonetheless as legitimate. For if the US elects McCain, he says, 'Europeans and others will conclude that their dispute is with not only one ruling clique, but Americans themselves'. Would it not tell us about America, he asks rhetorically, 'that the world's esteem is now unwanted'? And he concludes:
If Americans reject Obama, they will be sending the clearest possible message to the rest of us - and, make no mistake, we shall hear it.
Jonathan would, in effect, disenfranchise US voters. They must vote the way the rest of the world wants them to, or else... what exactly? Something like we'll lose all respect for them, perhaps?
Leave aside the fact that if McCain does win there'll still be millions of Americans who voted the other way. But what about respecting the right of US voters to vote on the basis of their own judgement, rather than the judgement of the denizens of Berlin, London or Paris?
Making this argument, Jonathan says in passing that if McCain wins...
A generation of young Americans - who back Obama in big numbers - will turn cynical, concluding that politics doesn't work after all.
He should have gone on to add that when the person elected is the one for whom most of the electorate have voted, politics - democratic politics, at any rate - kind of is working.