Bernd Debusmann

Here we go again.

It’s an American election year which means a season to bash France, Europe and China as well as drawing attention to un-American skills by presidential hopefuls. Such as speaking in foreign tongues.

Mastering foreign languages is considered an asset in most parts of the world but clearly not in the United States, a fact highlighted by attack ads in the race for the nomination of a Republican candidate to run against President Barack Obama next November.

One television clip mocked Mitt Romney, the present frontrunner, for speaking French. Another featured Jon Huntsman, who dropped out of the contest this week, and suggested that his fluency in Mandarin meant that he subscribed to Chinese rather than American values.

Attempts to exploit ignorance, prejudice and xenophobia are nothing new in American election campaigns, but even by their standards, the Huntsman ad stood out. Created by supporters of rival candidate Ron Paul, the 72-second ad is entitled The Manchurian Candidate, after a novel (and movie) about the son of a prominent political family who is brainwashed by Communists.

The attack on Romney harked back to the presidential elections of 2004, when Republicans portrayed Democratic contender John Kerry as an out-of-touch elitist who not only spoke French fluently but also looked French. In an oft-repeated description, coined by a Wall Street Journal commentator, Kerry was called “a haughty, French-looking Massachusetts Democrat.”

Romney is a former Massachusetts governor. So far, no-one has accused him of looking French but the ad notes that “just like John Kerry, he speaks French.”

Both in the 2004 campaign and now, Republicans stirred anti-French resentment, though for different reasons. Eight years ago, it was about the French government’s refusal to back the U.S. war on Iraq. Now, both France and Europe have become dirty words in the Republican dictionary because they are portrayed as a socialist threat to the global economy.

Europe-bashing is part of the stump speech of every candidate for the Republican nomination. Romney is the most consistent basher, perhaps to make up for the perceived stain of speaking French and having lived in France as an unsuccessful missionary for the Mormon church. He misses few opportunities for warning that President Obama wants to turn the United States into a “European-style welfare state.” That would, in his words, “poison the very spirit of America.”

Obama, according to Romney, “takes his inspiration from the capitals of Europe and has a European social Democratic vision.” Ron Paul takes the idea a step further: he wants to pull out U.S. troops stationed in Germany in order to stop “subsidizing” a “socialist” country. Republican stump speeches combine to a portrait of Europe as a collection of enterprise-stifling losers.

EUROPE SEEN THROUGH A DISTORTED LENS

This is seeing Europe through a severely distorted lens, notwithstanding the European Union’s current sovereign debt crisis and prolonged political problems to solve it.

Europe-bashers fail to mention that Europe is home to more of the world’s largest companies than the United States (179 to 140) and ranks higher on important quality-of-life indexes than the United States, from income inequality and access to health care to life expectancy, infant mortality and poverty levels.

(Last October, the Bertelsmann Foundation, a German think tank, published a study that examined such indicators in 31 of the 34 countries of the Paris-based Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD). It ranked the United States 23rd in providing health care and 20th on access to education.)

Pointing out such data is not fashionable at a time when America’s persistent high unemployment makes it tempting to look for scapegoats, foreign and domestic. But there are exceptions.

Nicholas Kristof, the liberal New York Times columnist, wrote from Paris this week that “the basic notion of Europe as a failure is a dangerous misconception.” And in Washington, Elisabeth Jacobs, a scholar at the Brookings Institution, a respected think tank, even held out Germany as an example Americans might do well to study and follow.

The global recession, she wrote in a paper on Maintaining Employment in a Difficult Economy, had much less drastic effects on Germany workers than on American workers. A key reason: labor market policies that encourage business to pursue long-term objectives in contrast to the traditional U.S. focus on short-term gains. That may not be a model that best serves the U.S. economy and American workers in competitive global markets, according to Jacobs.

Can such arguments dent the rigid views of Republican standard bearers? Unlikely. The talking points seem fixed. Romney: “I don’t think Europe is working in Europe. I know it won’t work here.”

Bernd Debusmann is a Reuters columnist. The opinions expressed are his own.

So much for charges from conservative contenders for the 2012 U.S. presidential elections that Barack Obama is not pro-Israel enough — the president just won seals of approval from Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, his far-right foreign minister, Avigdor Lieberman, and the U.S. lobby that usually reflects their views.

If the elections, as some predict, will include a contest on who loves Israel most, Obama can use their praise to good effect. How much it will contribute to his legacy is another matter.

The plaudits came in response to Obama’s address to the United Nations on Sept. 21, when he rejected the Palestinians’ bid for U.N. membership in what one Israeli journalist, Chemi Shalev of the left-leaning Haaretz newspaper, described as “probably the warmest pro-Israel speech ever given at an annual U.N. General Assembly meeting by any U.S. president, bar none.”

Its tone differed sharply from his moving description of the plight of the Palestinians in a speech in Cairo in 2009, five months after taking office. For 60 years, he said, they had endured the pain of dislocation and “the daily humiliations – large and small – that come with occupation. Let there be no doubt,” he said, “the situation of the Palestinians is intolerable.”

The Cairo speech raised expectations in the Arab world that here was a president who sympathized with the Palestinians and had the power, global prestige and commitment to succeed where a long line of his predecessors had tried and failed – help create a Palestinian state side-by-side with Israel. It didn’t work that way.

Fast forward to Sept. 21, 2011. No word about daily humiliations, dislocation, occupation, intolerable conditions. Instead, the emphasis was on centuries of persecution of Jews, anti-Semitic Arab school books, Israelis killed by Palestinian rockets and suicide bombs. As Rashid Khalidi, director of Columbia University’s Middle East Institute put it, “He recited a litany of suffering of Israelis with nothing about Palestinian hardships in a conflict whose most recent flare-up in 2008-09 left over 1,300 Palestinian victims and 13 Israelis.”

Netanyahu saw it differently. Obama had won a “badge of honor” with his address. Lieberman, a driving force behind the relentless construction of Jewish settlements in the West Bank, praised Obama for not mentioning that negotiations on a settlement of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict should be based on the 1967 borders.

The American Israeli Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) issued a statement expressing its appreciation for Obama’s rejection of the Palestinian U.N. bid and his insistence on the return to negotiations. Off and on, they have dragged on for two decades, during which Israel has tripled the number of Jewish settlements on land that is supposed to become a Palestinian state.

POLITICS TRUMP POLICY

What explains Obama’s transition from Cairo 2009 to New York 2011? In Washington, politics trump policy and Israel has been more of a domestic than a foreign policy issue even before the foundation of the Jewish state in 1948. When President Harry Truman and his top advisers discussed plans for the partition of Palestine in 1945, the experts warned against it. Truman is said to have responded: “I’m sorry, gentlemen, but I have to answer to hundreds of thousands who are anxious for the success of Zionism. I don’t have hundreds of thousands of Arabs among my constituents.”

Sixty-six years later, that kind of calculation still plays a role but in the case of Obama, there has been an additional element – a battle of will with the Israeli prime minister in which the leader of the world’s remaining superpower backed down repeatedly, on issues from a demand for a settlement freeze to the territorial lines on which negotiations should be based. The score so far: Netanyahu 3, Obama 0.

Which makes it rather bizarre that the two front-runners for the Republican presidential nomination, Texas Governor Rick Perry and former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney, are portraying Obama as favoring the Palestinians at the expense of Israel. In language that highlighted both ignorance and the toxic nature of American politics, Perry said Obama had pursued a policy of “appeasement” of the Palestinians.

The term dates back to the 1930s when British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain made concessions to Adolf Hitler to avoid going to war against Nazi Germany. In slightly less over-the-top terms, Romney talked of Obama’s efforts to “throw Israel under the bus.”

Whether Perry, Romney and other prominent Republicans manage to turn support for Israel into a wedge issue in 2012 is open to doubt in a race almost certainly dominated by jobs and the economy. But if it does emerge as a campaign topic, Obama can always wave the “badge of honor” awarded him by Netanyahu, to show that he is no different from a long line of American presidents much closer to Israel than to the Palestinians.