Explain the Bush-Kerry race in 90 seconds, in Japanese

Our man in Tokyo writes with some interesting questions. He is about to be interviewed on the leading Japanese television network as an expert on the United States (he is a radio and television personality himself and is not an academic). He asks me how I think most Americans see this election.

It’s easy for me to say what I think about the election. It’s not so easy for me to give a fair summary of how Americans think; for one thing, it’s tempting to assume that most Americans think the way I do, a theory that’s disproven every time the Nielsen ratings are published.

I answered along these lines: this has turned into a war election, with the progress of the war in Iraq being the main question and the undercurrent being the Vietnam War and the two candidates’ participation in it. The candidates aren’t talking about their own virtues much, but are mostly saying simply that the other guy is worse. And neither candidate is reaching out to the center; they’re both playing mostly to their own partisans. How would you answer?

He asked another interesting question: which candidate would be better for Japan? He, and many others in Japan, want to know.

We lose sight of how fortunate we are to live in the United States. We don’t worry about which politician in Japan, or Britain, or France, or Germany — or even in Canada and Mexico, our two neighbors — would be better for the United States. (Most Americans can’t even name the leader of either country.) And we don’t realize how intently many other nations watch our elections. In 1976 I had an engaging conversation with a college student in France who wanted to know why Chappaquiddick kept Edward Kennedy out of the 1976 Democratic primaries and what his prospects were for 1980. I haven’t heard lots of people here talk about J.-M. Le Pen.