Aus dem britischen Observer, von Armando Iannucci:
Über Barack Obama:
“[…] Trying to make sense of what he’s saying is like trying to wrap mist.
But, rhythmically, it’s quite alluring. It can make anything, even, for example, a simple chair, seem magnificent. Why vote for someone who says: ‘See that chair. You can sit on it’ when you can have someone like Obama say: ‘This chair can take your weight. This chair can hold your buttocks, 15 inches in the air. This chair, this wooden chair, can support the ass of the white man or the crack of the black man, take the downward pressure of a Jewish girl’s behind or the butt of a Buddhist adolescent, it can provide comfort for Muslim buns or Mormon backsides, the withered rump of an unemployed man in Nevada struggling to get his kids through high school and needful of a place to sit and think, the plump can of a single mum in Florida desperately struggling to make ends meet but who can no longer face standing, this chair, made from wood felled from the tallest redwood in Chicago, this chair, if only we believed in it, could sustain America’s huddled arse.’
[…]
I listened to all the victory speeches of the winning candidates last week and it was impossible to spot any difference in the message. Mike Huckabee said: ‘This election is not about me, it’s about we’, while Clinton came up with the variant: ‘You want this election to be about you.’
[…]
This abandonment of specifics is the opposite of how politics is articulated in Britain. Here, politicians have less power, less international influence and are at the mercy of the markets and even the weather, so they try covering this up with language that is all about pledging and specific target-setting - anything, in fact, that sounds like action.
‘We intend to provide a chair, which, over the next five-year period, will guarantee stability for anyone who sat on it.’ ‘We will introduce the most sweeping measures yet to ensure that all four chair legs are of exactly the same length and we will measure every leg on the chair twice a year and place those results in national chair-leg database.’ ‘We will stop other people coming over to use the chair before us.’
American politicians take time out from their busy lives to makes speeches that sound empty; British politicians fill the emptiness of their lives with words that make them sound busy. The chair, by the way, was made in China.”