Calm down, Jonathan

As a longtime Americanophile, Jonathan Freedland has not had an easy time over the past eight years.

For the last eight years, it's been hard to keep the flame alive. Those of us who have admired America since childhood - seeing it as endlessly fascinating, brimming with energy and founded on the deeply radical ideal of self-government - felt increasingly beleaguered after 2001.

I have some sympathy with him. I'm not an anything-o-phile but, as someone who, on the whole, has a positive view of America, I sometimes found it difficult to make the America-is-OK-really argument during a period when the President had clearly lost the plot.

But, in all the excitement, Jonathan got a bit carried away.

But it's not just the result of the US election that is inspiring. The election itself revealed America to be among the most politically engaged nations on earth. For two years, the electorate paid close attention to a sustained argument about their future. The party conventions, like the 90-minute debates, drew bigger audiences than the Olympics and the Oscars. Blogs and cable TV shows that obsessed over the tiniest detail of the campaign built loyal followings. Those of us outside the US, living in societies bedevilled by apathy and low turnout, can only look on in envy.

Really?

For the moment, thanks to America's ramshackle electoral machinery, we still don't know what the actual turnout was but Curtis Gans, director of American University’s Center for the Study of the American Electorate, estimates it at somewhere between 60.7% and 61.7%.

Even if we assume the higher number is right, that's 0.3% higher than the last UK election and a whole 2.3% higher than 2001, the UK's lowest turnout since 1918, when there was much breast-beating from the British political establishment about voter apathy.

Historically, our bad turnouts are not much worse than America's good ones. Jonathan Freedland needs to sober up and recheck his sums.

Comments

[Rastaman]

So many people finding so many reasons to claim that B.O. got a mandate from the people. What he got was huge illegal sums from foreign countries and outspent his opponent about 4 to 1 in order to win by a bare margin.

Most of us over here have no confidence in that bald-faced liar and his party any more than we do in the other party. Your government and ours are both going down the same slippery slope and I swear they're holding hands while they do it.

As to our ramshackle machinery, excuse me? A few states do have problems with outdated equipment, but you need to remember that our country is just a tiny bit larger than yours and divided up into 50 autonomous units, and most of those states are each about twice the size of the UK. Our population, 5 times larger than yours, is scattered over an area 70 times larger than the UK.

Being autonomous in most regards, each state is responsible for establishing its own balloting and ballot counting processes and it's been this way since our nation was founded. Considering this, they all really do a pretty good job of coordination.

On the flip side of the coin, anyone who wants to find fault with America can do much better than picking on our electoral peccadillos. Look at the pond scum we keep electing to run the place, for instance. Of course, that puts us in the same box as you Britishers, but let's ignore that. Then there's that bailout... oops, right, over there too.

You know what the bottom line is here? You guys are going to Hell in a hand cart and we're right behind you. Once again, England leads the world.