SFGate: Europeans watch American elections as if they have a stake - because they do - by Steve Kettman

For the complete report from SFGate click on this link

Europeans watch American elections as if they have a stake - because they do - by Steve Kettman

Through much of this year, the big story out of Europe was that people all over the continent were paying an unprecedented amount of attention to the long, intense and forever shifting U.S. presidential campaign.This rapt interest had in part to do with a palpable yearning to turn the page on the Bush years, and in part with excitement over what was widely seen as the likelihood of a boundary-busting candidate taking the White House, whether Hillary Rodham Clinton or Barack Obama. Yet there were voices in the United States who tried to paint this European interest in our presidential succession as somehow prurient, or based only on the celebrity factor, as if European interests were not very much at stake. When Obama brought his campaign here in late July and addressed me and 200,000 others gathered in Berlin's Tiergarten, he made a point of introducing himself as "a proud citizen of the United States, and a fellow citizen of the world." He thus made clear that he saw the destiny and future of Europe and the United States as closely intertwined.

Many in Europe assume that in the aftermath of the economic crisis, the era of unquestioned U.S. economic leadership in the world will have passed. They see the turmoil now roiling the markets as an indication of the untrustworthiness of a U.S. model based so openly on encouraging what we call the profit motive and what others might simply refer to as greed.