The Campaign Begins
The phone rings more often these days with requests from friends for information on le gouvernor Dew-coq-kees and his equally mysterious (although more pronounceable) colleagues in the Democratic primaries. European interest rises now that New Hampshire and Super Tuesday have moved the focus to the personalities of a few identifiable frontrunners.</br></br>Foreigners care about our elections in a way that we do not care about theirs. They know that the quirks and whimsies of Occupant, 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. NW, can touch their lives directly because of America's economic and military power.</br></br>The current fashion of talking up an alleged shrinking of American power abroad has not changed this. America's overseas friends and opponents still listen and read more closely during a U.S. campaign than Americans ever would in following an election abroad. They cringe or heave sighs of relief on a regular basis depending on the campaign news.</br></br>The only close equivalent is the kind of attention we rivet on the signs of an open power struggle in the Kremlin, where our fate is implicated. And in years like this one, some Europeans will argue sincerely that the American process is as opaque for them as Kremlin proceedings are for us.</br></br>At a Paris dinner, for example, conversation turns to the two Reverends and their campaigns, which are assumed here to be the endeavors of ego-tripping fringe candidates. The notion put forward by an American that Jesse Jackson and Pat Robertson are likely to wind up influencing the platforms and perhaps even the Cabinet choices of their parties provokes amused and patronizing astonishment.