If the reaction of Belgians to the US presidential campaign is typical of publics throughout Europe and the rest of the world - a recent multi-country poll commissioned by The Guardian and other papers shows that Belgians are among the world's most pro-Obama and anti-Bush - then the United States is enjoying a massive public diplomacy bonanza. For free. Thanks to overseas Americans.
For the past several months, but especially in the last weeks leading up to November 4, the services of the Democrats Abroad Belgium (DAB) "Speakers Bureau" have been much in demand. It might sound impressive, but the "bureau" is just a handful of regular American citizens who happen to be conversant in one or more of Belgium's three official languages: Dutch, French, or German. English too: in this international atmosphere, it is often the lingua franca of think tanks, educational institutions, discussion groups and news media following the US election.
If we've been swept up in the media frenzy (last night it was the multilingual TV channel "Euronews" filming a bunch of us at a local pub), imagine the toll that this is taking on the Republican. I say "the" Republican, since the stalwart head of the GOP group in Belgium seems to be a one-man show, trotted out to debate Democrats who put forward one of at least a half dozen debaters who share the burden.
The questions naturally betray the pro-Democratic bias of many of the audiences. Weary of eight years of Bush unilateralism, terrified at the prospect of a US-led worldwide depression, Europeans want to see an invigorated America under new management. Luckily for us Dems, this coincides perfectly with our point of view. European audiences have to be reminded, however, of the ugly underside of American democracy: voter suppression. Greg Palast and Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who have written "Block The Vote" in the current Rolling Stone, have also recorded a BBC documentary where they show the myriad ways in which millions - millions - of Americans are prevented from voting.
To Europeans, where in countries like Belgium voting is mandatory, this anti-democratic shrinkage of the electorate is inconceivable. People receive notices inviting them to vote, and turnout exceeds 90%. Belgium may have more than its share of political complexity, but gaming the actual voting system is not one of them. In France, a much larger democracy with far-flung overseas territories, somehow millions of people vote with paper ballots in boxes with slots at the top, which are tabulated by citizen volunteers in time for results announced on the evening TV news.
In the US, meanwhile, the State Department's Undersecretary for Public Diplomacy is organizing the I-VOTE program to promote foreign understanding of the immensely complex and seemingly jury-rigged US electoral system (image above from I-VOTE). Good initiative, the kind that is done every four years in the US and abroad at its embassies, where local officials, academics, and journalists are invited to straw polls, election night parties, and - depending on the time zone - morning-after breakfasts.
This year, the positive impact of the Obama phenomenon is being multiplied many times over by the kind of citizen public diplomacy us Democrats (and that sole Republican!) are waging on our own dime here in Brussels. If the Democrats led by Obama win - and especially if the election is shown to be fair and square - the beneficiaries will be all Americans, for the world will see that American democracy is not just a PR story.
"With liberty and justice for all" - so ends the American Pledge of Allegiance. In his essay on the subject for the Heritage Foundation, libertarian Ward Connerly wrote in 1996 that in America, "we are guaranteed the right to vote." Would that it were so. Ten years later, Constitutional lawyer Garret Epps in Salon wrote "You have no right to vote," a sad chronicle of the ambivalent American approach to that most fundamental of democratic practices.
My wife and I have just sent in our absentee ballots. I wish I could say that we had a good feeling, but our sense of patriotic duty is marred by a realization that many things can go wrong, just like they did in elections past in our benighted County in Florida - Broward-of-the-hanging-chads. Maybe her hyphenated name lacks a crucial hyphen - disqualified! Maybe our Belgian postmark will be smudged - suspect... discard! Maybe, as in 2002, the county will just lose 100,000 absentee ballots. For the sake of American democracy - not to speak of the US image in the world - there has to be a better way.