The Election from Abroad

The US election is just over a day away right now, but it can feel very far away. Nowadays I'm talking a lot of politics, especially with my western friends, but when you take a step back, it's true that the winner won't change my daily life too much over here. This is actually my second straight election spent abroad, though this time there's a chance I could spend the entire next term as a foreign resident.  And yet this is undoubtedly the election I've followed the most. This election does not need to alter my morning commute or my nighttime news to have an immense impact on my life.

Observing US politics from far away, you notice some embarrassing patterns. For one, the partisanship is unbearable. Campaign staffs monitor every event way closer than they should and look for every opportunity to spin a quote or hand gesture into an attack.  Every single reaction is so blinded by those ideological shades. It's funny that some very fundamental beliefs can align one's ideological leanings to a party line on so many issues, and that's a major reason why our country is so divided.  It starts from what role you believe government should play, and almost everything else stems from there.

This election is mainly about the economy. There are 1000 important issues but that's the one that matters most to most Americans, particularly swing voters. Specifically when you consider the us economy is still the #1 in the world and GDP has bee growing, you realize that the issue is really unemployment. Unemployment has only recently dropped below 8% after hovering close to 10% for much of Obama's term. If you are an Obama supporter, you'll believe that he inherited a mess from the bush administration and that he's prevented a real depression and has led us towards recovery. If you are a Romney supporter you question how deep that bush mess really was and believe that Obama has had plenty of time to fix things and hasn't. A PhD in Economics couldn't definitively tell you otherwise - is the sluggish economy Bush's fault, Obama's fault, Europes fault or inevitable? So your view on this crucial issue boils down to a matter of opinion more than anything else.

Popular national opinion is that we need to find a way to keep more jobs in America. We need to keep our manufacturing industry alive, we need to stand up China and stop sending our jobs and money there. Both Obama and Romney have echoed these sentiments. Nonetheless, both know that the logical and necessary solution may not follow their rhetoric. Romney the businessman knew that exporting jobs to China could help American businesses, and Obama the president hasn't complained about Chinese trade practices until recently. There is much mention in American media about the Chinese currency manipulation practices, but I have never heard someone explain the Chinese perspective. From what I understand, an immediate market correction of The yuan will help American laborers compete with Chinese laborers and reduce the price of American goods in China. It will also increase the real value of Chinese goods in China and Chinese products in the Us. The end result will be the goods many Americans buy will get more expensive, many poor Chinese will see their livelihoods reduced and perhaps starve, and our labor needs will go to Vietnam and the Philippines. But the only people who can vote are American citizens and all they want are jobs and so this rhetoric keeps being repeated. The truth is that our economy has been evolving and will continue to evolve. Maybe our days as a manufacturing and automobile leader are over. Maybe factories will disappear from the American landscape. But that doesn't have to mean our economy will suffer. We can press our advantages in technological innovations, our amazing higher education opportunities, our positive brain gain. These are perhaps the best qualities of America that most Americans just take for granted. But alas we want to be the best at everything, and telling people otherwise is a sure fire way to lose an election.

If being president only meant being in charge of the economy, Romney would be a good choice. The man has a proven track record of running companies well and resurrecting Bain & Company. I do believe that his experience in consulting is relevant to running an economy. But I don't believe running a country is similar to running a business. There are many things the leader of a nation must do that don't help the "bottom line" even indirectly. The President represents the entire country and has to understand the concerns of all sorts of underrepresented and less privileged groups, no mean feat in a country as diverse as the US. The president acts as the face of our nation to the globe. When we elect a president, we show the world the type of upstanding and accomplished people our country is capable of putting out there. 

In the many years Mitt Romney has been a public figure in my zone of awareness, I have never considered him a man who empathized with many different types of people. After examining his life story, he seems to me a person whose life goal was to be important. He went at that initially by going to business school and making a lot of money. After having accrued his fortune, he figured he was important in his circles but could get important on a much larger stage by going into politics. His entire political career has been one of changing political views whenever it becomes suitable, and I tried very hard to find evidence of a single issue that he was genuinely passionate about and had sought office to change, except maybe reducing government inefficiencies.  Perhaps I'm not giving him enough credit for his religious faith and his active involvement in charities, but he doesn't play that up either. This is all in contrast to Obama who seems like a classic bleeding heart liberal, who clearly is passionate about civil rights issues, evident from when he eschewed high paying law firms for community activism and civil rights law after graduation law school. No Obama has not been immune to pandering or ideological waffling either, particularly on foreign policy. But in essence, Romney and Obama represent two very different types of politicians who enter the game for very different reasons.

Of the many gaffes and flaws the media has covered on Romney in this age-old election cycle, the one I disliked the most was his comment on Palestinian economic inferiority to Israel. This was the time he claimed that "culture makes all the difference," implying that the Israeli culture was better suited for making money, and not the time he claimed that Palestinians are not interested in peace.  He made matters worse in my mind by defending his comments, saying he wasn't attacking Palestinian culture, that the same cultural phenomenon happens with US/Mexico.  So much of the last four years of my life has been about understanding different cultures and I'm very aware that the power of culture is strong enough to impact a nation's economy. But I also know how complicated it is to understand a culture different from one own, how so many of the little nuances and constantly evolving traditions cannot be boiled down into a statement like the one the Governor made. And even if you interpret his comment as one praising the Israeli Jewish culture as one that values economic prosperity, you open a whole new set of stereotypes and debates on what a culture should value.  It was a remarkably shocking statement for someone who spent two years living in France, and really makes me question Romney's foreign policy potential.

But he might win.  I believe my man Nate Silver and his model, which is still confidently behind Obama, but even he gives Romney a 14% chance to win. When I look at my Facebook feed and my friends here, I'm very hard pressed to find Republican voters. I have some friends from Georgetown who made themselves well-known in College Republicans, but from a life living in Massachusetts, DC, as a minority college-educated yuppie and now living abroad (where ex-pats are perhaps even more overwhelmingly liberal) has led to run in some very liberal circles. We are the ones turned off by conservatives' unequal attitudes towards women, gay rights, minorities. We see conservatives as narrow-minded, unwilling to help the poor, convinced by the lies that Fox News tells them, clinging to their guns and American-made trucks.  But we don't really know them. So who are these people who are voting for Romney? What is their deal?

To an extent I kind of get them. I try to put myself into a small middle America town. I try to grow up as a lower-middle class white boy in an all-white town, going to church with my community, trying very hard to be a good boy with good manners and a good work ethic. We know about these people in the cities but we don't bother ourselves with them, because they live sinful lives of debauchery, throwing around money, etc. We stick to our simple ways. Or maybe I'm in a former coal town in Pennsylvania, and this used to be a friendly community of factory workers. People would go to work, leave the shift and go en masse to the local pub, have a great time and leave their doors unlocked.  But now the factories are closing, and Hispanics are moving in.  Some are from Dominican Republic, Puerto Rico,  other American cities.  They're nice enough but they don't hang out in the pub with us, they don't embrace our community. They do a lot of their own things and neither of us feel safe.  We're not racist but we want someone more like us in charge, because we want a leader who can understand us, cause after all we're still the majority.

Maybe that's the thought process of some Romney voters. And maybe there are flaws there.  But these are Americans who believe that their parents' America was strong and aren't sure their childrens' America will be. It would take a long time to change these mentalities. So yes, I'm an Asian-American who loves diversity and strongly believe that Obama can connect with way more people than Romney can, but I'm also aware that there are a lot of white voters out there who think they're getting marginalized and wonder if they'll ever see a white president again. I highly doubt any of them are reading this post, but if they are, I want to tell them that they are the next changing demographic. They are the ones we will have to reach out to, for more mutual understanding, else our country is in trouble.  If Romney wins, we will likely have a president who wins 0% of the black vote and 20% of the minority vote.  We will have a country that despite so much progress, will be racially divided over its leader. If Romney wins, the core conservative white base may think that their beliefs have been justified, that they've been right all along and that they don't need to reach out. And wow that would be a dangerous outcome.

So this election affects me a lot here. I have some hope for the United States. I don't think our system and way of life is perfect but I think our methods are working and getting better. I think there are good candidates in our country and lots of ideas being heard and a lot of hard work being done.  I think democracy breathes life into a country and I think the system will get better and better and spread to more and more of the world.