Michael de Laine

President Obama

Editorials from Danish newspapers on 6 November

The newly elected president must act in order to exploit the confidence he now has, wrote Kristeligt Dagblad.

It’s been a long time since the world experienced a similar case of global enthusiasm and hopes for renewal and change as we have seen with the election of the black senator Barack Obama to the president of the USA. His appeal reaches far beyond the USA’s own borders and that’s a good feeling at a time characterised by colossal challenges.

Obama’s opportunities for making an important mark on our day and age are considerable, if they are used correctly, but there is also a risk of great disappointments.

With his presence alone he renders visible the changes in US society from the Civil War to the current age, when a representative of the minority groups can reach the top. That’s a powerful symbolic weapon that he should know how to use.

The USA’s new leader has the chance to become a transformative president, as former Secretary of State Colin Powell formulated it recently, and that does not only apply to American domestic politics.

The western world needs competent leadership at the moment. There’s a large vacuum to be filled following several years in which the confidence in the USA has been overstrained and its international image seriously impaired.

Obama must act quickly if he is to be able to carry out this task. He must manage to turn the victory and his great backing into visible national and international results already during his first year in office.

If he doesn’t succeed, then his agenda will be overshadowed by the defeats that will inevitably come as the need to compromise to get results becomes irresistible.

In this connection it would be useful if the current expectation level is lowered and the Obama euphoria replaced by more realistic expectations.

This would be good for the coming president, who needs broad support, also from circles that preferred John McCain.

And it would also be good for the rest of us.

Politics is hard business, especially at this level, and Barack Obama should not be turned into anything other than the politician he is - albeit one of the more gifted and visionary politicians, wrote Kristeligt Dagblad.

Noting that Barack Obama now has many friends, Politiken wrote that it can be difficult to find new ways of paying tribute to a politician who is supported by 85% of Danes and is now praised by all Danish politicians from the right-wing Danish People’s Party to the Red-Green Unity List on the left, although there were few Barack Obama supporters in the government parties before he was elected.

There are some things about Obama that deserve mention now that everyone likes him, Politiken added.

Right from the start he has been an opponent of the USA’s war in Iraq, which he considers to be a catastrophic error. And he regards the liberalisation of financial institutions and George W Bush’s massive tax cuts to the rich as the main causes of the global financial crisis.

Obama’s central agenda for domestic policy is to make the public sector part of the solution of ordinary people’s problems - such as universal health insurance and improvements to education and research through higher investments.

He prefers dialogue to confrontation; he is including, not excluding; he is not looking for enemies, but collaborative partners; he will also negotiate with his enemies because it is with your enemies that you make peace.

For Barack Obama, ethnic, religious, linguistic and racial diversity is not a threat but a matter of course that means a free society and the possibility of a more peaceful world rest on a foundation where the bearing elements are mutual respect and a feeling of commonwealth with room for all.

If all Danish politicians agree that the whole of this outlook should also apply to Danish domestic and foreign policies, then it is also really good news.

It will be interesting to see if the enthusiasm for the new leader of the free world really is that global, wrote Politiken.

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Hope and change

Editorials from some Danish newspapers on 5 November

The mildest expression that can be used to describe the Bush era in the US is that is a time of wasted opportunities, wrote Information. No matter how it is measured, the country’s situation has worsened drastically over the past eight years. The federal government, home-owners and consumers are in debt to up over both ears and the US owes colossal sums to foreign investors.

The infrastructure is worn down, the educational sector is in a scandalous state, and the health sector is in a crisis that is almost impossible to overcome. These matters and the recent financial crisis, where there is a need to regulate the US financial sector, and the deep recession expected in 2009 and 2010 must stand high on the new president’s agenda. And how the winner of Tuesday’s election will avoid drastically rising unemployment and stagflation in his first period in office only the gods know.

With these challenges facing him, the new president will be forced to implement broad reforms - but if he fails, then he will be fired by the US voters in 2012, wrote Information.

The US has grounds for celebrating Barack Obama’s clear victory, wrote Berlingske Tidende. It was a victory that was national and more far-reaching than is normal with presidential elections in a divided country.

The victory can gather Americans at a time when it is more necessary than ever for them to stand together. It was a well-deserved victory and one has rarely seen a person who could get Americans to stand together just through his personality.

But now everyday life starts and Obama must show whether he can transfer rhetoric and visions to real policies.

Americans have started to accumulate new enemies that could need just as many resources to fight as the war on terror. And countries that are allied to the US have started to show hesitation towards the fight on terror - not because they do not believe in it, but because George W Bush has so little else left to offer.

Here, wrote Berlingske Tidende, Obama can perhaps help draw developments into the correct direction again.

The expectations to Obama are high, but he is untried and we know very little about him. However, he has grown with the task over the past year’s campaigning and he has developed clear policies in a number of areas that are important to us, such as Iraq, Afghanistan and the war on terror. And he takes his role as world leader seriously.

Another great challenge will be the financial crisis, wrote Berlingske Tidende. The world’s largest economy is about to fall apart and it will be an uphill battle to get the US on its feet again. In this Obama has need not only of the help of the Americans but also of the whole world.

Europeans have great expectations to the USA’s 44th president - and perhaps they are too great, wrote Morgenavisen Jyllands-Posten.

The hope from low to high, from the old Europe to the new is that Europe will be heard by the new president and his administration.

The EU’s foreign ministers discussed on the evening before election day in the US whether they should send a letter to the new president asking for closer collaboration on foreign policy focal points such as the Middle East, Afghanistan and Pakistan, and on relations with Russia.

They gave up the idea. But, asked Jyllands-Posten, what did the manoeuvre actually express? That Europe wants to speak with one voice in order to show that the chasms between the old Europe and the new have been bridged? Or is it rather a cry for help and an admission that the union - despite much talk about a common EU foreign policy - has still not managed to make itself felt as a weighty player in conflict areas but still depends on American involvement?

Europeans have been pretty good at finding rules for chair lifts and the depth of water basins in zoological gardens. The union is economically strong but is a foreign policy dwarf that has neither the competences nor the decision-making procedures needed for action.

The common foreign policy for the EU has been a theory for far too long, as Germany’s former Chancellor, Helmut Schmidt, said in Die Zeit at the start of this year. And the telephone number that Henry Kissinger asked for many years ago still does not exist. And should the USA’s new Secretary of State cross the Atlantic, he/she is unlikely to get a single clear response on pressing questions, Jyllands-Posten noted.

To use a hackneyed phrase from the American election campaign, the Europeans’ expectations to the relationship between the US and Europe is ‘Hope and Change’, wrote Jyllands-Posten, which underlined that Europe must take its responsibility seriously and speak with one voice.

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The noise of success

By Michael de Laine

Copenhagen, 5 November 2008

The noise was overwhelming and constant, the noise level varying from just about tolerable to jet engine, as the talk, the music and the TVs and conspired against peace. Whether it was blues, jazz, CNN or US Ambassador James P Cain, what really mattered at the AmChamDenmark Election Night Party at the Marriott Hotel on Copenhagen’s waterfront last night was the results of the presidential election.

The atmosphere was pregnant - would Barack Obama gain the support that the polls predicted to become the first African-American president, or would John McCain swing enough votes to take him and the first woman vice-president candidate to the White House?

As the results came in, they were greeted with shouts and screams of pleasure as it became increasingly obvious that the Obama-Biden ticket would rule the night. While the Marriott Hotel event started to peter out, other election partying was in full swing - and the enthusiasm at the party hosted by the Social Democratic Youth of Denmark also knew no bounds as the results ticked in.

What voters in the US and the people around the world were looking for was change - the change promised by Obama, and the implication that the world needs a new John F Kennedy. And with the current world political situation, change is necessary.

As ambassador Cain noted, this is the first time in 35 years that the president will have come straight from the Senate, which means the new president will have a chance to work together with the House of Representatives and the Senate to solve some of the big issues in the US and the world.

The change is evidenced by an African-American presidential candidate and a woman vice-president candidate albeit on different political tickets. Asked about this combination and why it comes now, Cain explained that America has been changing in recent years, and the demographic and social changes have meant that it is now quite natural for non-whites and women to run for the highest political offices.

According to Kristeligt Dagblad’s editor, Michael Ehrenreich, there has been almost a popular movement demanding change, a new direction - which Barack Obama seems to be able to deliver. This change can lead to renewed optimism in the US, which can become stronger as a nation, and will benefit Denmark and Europe.

As well as reciting the ten best, late-night jokes of the election campaign season, Cain plugged his new book, ‘Amerikaneren’ - the first time ever, according to the State Department, that a sitting ambassador publishes a book in the local language.

As well as reciting the ten best, late-night jokes of the election campaign season, Cain plugged his new book, ‘Amerikaneren’ - the first time ever, according to the State Department, that a sitting ambassador publishes a book in the local language.

But because he has to be impartial, Cain would not comment on which of the candidates he would vote for.

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Appearances do matter - to voters

By Michael de Laine

Copenhagen, 4th November 2008

With the US presidential election voting in full swing, US researchers have revealed that voting decisions are more associated with the brain’s response to negative aspects of a politician’s appearance than to positive ones. However, the research takes no notice of policies…

Researchers from the California Institute of Technology (Caltech), Scripps College, Princeton University and the University of Iowa say appearance seems to play a particularly strong role when voters have little or no information about a politician apart from his or her physical appearance.

Deciding whom to trust, fear or vote for in an election depends, in part, on quick, implicit judgments about people’s faces - a scientifically documented general finding.

Michael Spezio, an assistant professor of psychology at Scripps College and visiting associate at Caltech, and Antonio Rangel, an associate professor of economics at Caltech, examined brain activation in subjects looking at pictures of the faces of real politicians in an attempt to discover how a politician’s appearance might influence voting decisions.

The researchers conducted two independent studies using different groups of volunteers viewing the images of different politicians. Volunteers were shown pairs of photos, each with a politician coupled with their opponent in a real election in 2002, 2004, or 2006. None of the volunteers were familiar with the politicians whose images they viewed.

In some experiments, the volunteers had to make character-trait judgments about the politicians – for example, which of the two politicians in the pair looked more competent to hold congressional office, or which looked more likely to physically threaten the volunteer. In other experiments, volunteers were asked to cast their vote for one politician in the pair; once again, their decisions were based only on the politicians’ appearances.

The results correlated with actual election outcomes. For example, politicians who were thought to look the most physically threatening in the experiment were more likely to have actually lost their elections in real life. The correlation held true even when volunteers saw the politicians’ pictures for less than one tenth of a second.

The pictures of politicians who lost elections, both in the lab and in the real world, were associated with greater activation in key brain areas known to be important for processing emotion. This was true when volunteers simply voted and also when they closely examined the politicians’ pictures for character traits.

The studies suggest that negative evaluations based only on a politician’s appearance have some effect on real election outcomes – and, specifically, may influence which candidate will lose an election. This influence appears to be more uniform than the influence exerted by positive evaluations based on appearance.

“The results from our two studies suggest that intangibles like a candidate’s appearance may work preferentially, or more uniformly, via negative motives, and by means of brain processing contributing to such negative evaluations,” says Spezio.

“It’s important to note that the brain region most closely associated with seeing pictures of election losers - the insula - is known to be important in processing both negative and positive emotional evaluations,” he adds. “Its increased activation in response to the appearance of election losers is consistent with its association with negative emotional evaluations in several domains, including the sight of someone who looks disgusted or untrustworthy.”

According to a second researcher, R. Michael Alvarez, a professor of political science at Caltech and co-director of the Caltech/MIT Voting Technology Project, “Candidates try to evoke emotional reactions when they campaign for office, and this research gives us a new perspective on how much emotions might matter, and how they might matter, in terms of how voters view candidates.”

One aspect of the study surprised researchers: negative evaluations, such as the perception that a candidate is threatening, influence election loss significantly more than positive evaluations like attractiveness influence election success.

“While these findings are certainly very provocative, it is important to note their limitations,” says Ralph Adolphs, Bren Professor of Psychology and Neuroscience and professor of biology at Caltech, and director of the Caltech Brain Imaging Center.

In particular, he adds, the observed effects, while statistically significant, were rather small.

“There is no doubt that many, many sources of information come into play when we make important and complex decisions,” he says. “We are not claiming that how the candidates look is all there is to the story of how voters make up their minds – or that this is even the biggest part of the story. However, we do think it has some effect – and, moreover, that this effect may be largest when voters know little else about a candidate.”

Other research, this time conducted at Northwestern University in Chicago, Illinois, indicates that good-looking women have good chances of being voted into political office, while male candidates can be ugly - as long as they seem to be competent.

“The study reveals that the fair sex is under extra pressure and that being attractive is important for women candidates if they are to do well at an election,” says Joan Chiao, the researcher behind the project.

Together with researcher colleagues, Chiao let a panel of 38 women and 35 men adults see - for a second - black and white photos of 46 female and 60 male candidates who stood for election to the US House of Representatives in 2006. Special hair, skin or clothing coloration was neutralised by the choice of black and white shots, and the best-known candidates were excluded.

The panel had to decide how attractive each candidate was, and how competent, domineering and open he or she seemed.

Then the panel was given more time to study each photo before deciding which candidate they would vote for in a presidential election.

While both the men and the women in the panel wanted politicians who appeared competent, female candidates had to be attractive - but this was not the case for the male candidates.