As one of the unfortunate non-Americans who are more exposed than most to election news from the United States, I'd like to offer an outside point of view.
Why "unfortunate"?
Because American politics stinks. It has stunk since the 1950s, and we all (but apparently, less than half of you) know it.
It's blindingly obvious to us out here, that a nation which forces itself to contemplate an unfeeling parasite like Mitt Romney for its leader is in serious trouble. Romney is nothing more than a biz-bot, and a ruthless one, not above lying point-blank about his taxes on 60 Minutes while on the campaign trail - no less.
A successful nation is not, and has never been, a business venture. A successful nation runs on humanistic principles - even the ancient Romans understood this. A successful nation's capital is its people; and everyone knows by now what Romney thinks of those.
It's difficult for the average outsider to understand why America is struggling to absorb this fundamental reality of politics. Some very good books have been written on the topic, most of them by Americans; which only makes the various American political obscenities of the last half century even more puzzling.
Why, to take the simplest example, is the United States still so confused about universal health care?
It's not rocket science.
This 2003 report showed that the U.S. expenditure on health care was a whopping 13% of GDP. That translates to over US$4,600 per person, compared to an average of less than US$2,000 in countries with universal health care. And 7.2 of those percentage points is claimed either by private insurance or out-of-pocket expenses; so the average American (and/or their employer) in 2003 was paying around $2,500 per year in medical costs. Which is considerably more than the total cost per head under the average universal health care system.
This doesn't make a blind bit of sense, unless you regard profit to private companies as a higher priority than both citizens' welfare and government expenditure. (If you do, you need to catch up.) And it has nothing to do with quality of care - life expectancy in the U.S. was the lowest of the ten nations in that report.
No wonder so many of us, and some of you too, regard Americans on the whole as irretrievably stupid. Why would a democracy behave like this? Why would you vote for someone who would abandon YOU - you personally, not just Romney's "victims", whoever they are - to the terrifying destitution and helplessness that traps so many of you when you get sick? It's bizarre. It humiliates all Americans, in front of the whole world; and the attacks on the Obama Administration's efforts to change it look very queer. Elected representatives in other nations would not only actively support such changes; they would insist on them.
Those of us (and those of you) who have thought about it, know that America's current domestic problems are ideological in origin. As evidence of that, I don't mind predicting that any G.O.P. supporters who read the above comments will respond with strident bleatings about "user pays" and the oh-so-tiresome anti-"socialism" tirades.
Two whole generations of Americans now have been slaves to "socialism" - the word, not the idea. You can practically hear the chains clink around people's necks when it's mentioned. It might be amusing, if the depth of the exploitation enabled by it were not so grotesque.
America as a whole really does seem peculiarly prone to being duped by stubborn, and often crude ideologies, which benefit a small and blatantly self-motivated fraction of the population - or even only incidental stakeholders, if you think about the Cold War anti-communism fantasies that fed the travesty in Vietnam and the histrionics of McCarthyism.
Suicide rates are the plainest indicator there is of social insecurity; and the rest of the world, as well as a lot of you - see this 2006 study conducted by the Harvard Medical School, which found "strong correlations of state-based suicide rates in the United States with proposed indicators of access to healthcare" - know that healthcare is fundamental to preventing such problems.
Why do you do this to yourselves? And why on earth subject any of us to the prospect of a dangerous incompetent like Romney in the White House?
We really do wish you'd just stop it.
Source: http://www.dailykos.com/story/2012/09/25/1135973/-An-Outside-POV
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