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Press Favored Obama Throughout Campaign
Posted by
ScuttleMonkey
on Mon Nov 10, 2008 08:29 AM
from the kudos-for-owning-up-to-it dept.
from the kudos-for-owning-up-to-it dept.
narcberry writes "After complaints of one-sided reporting, the Washington Post checked their own articles and agreed. Obama was clearly favored, throughout his campaign, in terms of more favorable articles, less criticism, better page real-estate, more pictures, and total disregard for problems such as his drug use. 'Stories and photos about Obama in the news pages outnumbered those devoted to McCain. Reporters, photographers and editors found the candidacy of Obama, the first African American major-party nominee, more newsworthy and historic. Journalists love the new; McCain, 25 years older than Obama, was already well known and had more scars from his longer career in politics. The number of Obama stories since Nov. 11 was 946, compared with McCain's 786. Both had hard-fought primary campaigns, but Obama's battle with Hillary Rodham Clinton was longer, and the numbers reflect that. McCain clinched the GOP nomination on March 4, three months before Obama won his. From June 4 to Election Day, the tally was Obama, 626 stories, and McCain, 584. Obama was on the front page 176 times, McCain, 144 times; 41 stories featured both.'"
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Duh. (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm glad someone is finally stating the obvious.
Re:Duh. (Score:5, Insightful)
Not only that, perhaps we can now realize that exercising free speech actually *does* have consequences and hence cannot be treated as an inert exercise of one's freedom.
Perhaps as a civilization this sort of thing may help us grow up and realize that the right of free speech comes with the duty to exercise it responsibly. More generally, all rights come with a corresponding duty.
The question is, however, do we as a people have the collective intelligence and insight to pick up the socio-political subtleties of this sort of thing?
Parent
Re:Duh. (Score:5, Insightful)
>>>realize that the right of free speech comes with the duty to exercise it responsibly.
Translation: You can only say what "the authorities" allow you to say. In that case it's no longer FREE speech. It's slave speech (where your mouth is no longer your own, but is controlled by somebody else). Anybody who attempts to take away my right to say or print whatever I feel like saying will answer for it to the fullest measure. "From time to time the Tree of Liberty must be watered with the blood of patriots and tyrants." - Founder of the Democratic Party, Thomas Jefferson.
If you want balance, you do it through freedom and liberty, not control. If the Washington Post prints Obama-loving articles, than you counterbalance that with your own paper which prints McCain-loving articles. You then leave it to the People to decide, for themselves, where the truth lies. Not some authoritarian censor.
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Re: You can only say what "the authorities" allow (Score:5, Insightful)
You're overlooking one critical aspect of responsibility: it's not an external decision imposed on you. It's an internal decision you impose on yourself.
Yes, the First Amendment gives you the right to say almost anything you care to. Falsely yelling "fire" in a crowded theater is an example of something the First Amendment does not give you the right to do. The example of the Westboro Baptist Church, on the other hand, is something that is protected under First Amendment rights.
Where does responsibility meet the First Amendment? In the first case, by not spreading false and potentially harmful information. In the second case... there's no act of responsibility behind that particular organization's communications.
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Re:Duh. (Score:5, Insightful)
I find it comical anyone could deny bias occored, and when proven wrong its then justified by claiming Obama was more positive.
The point is being missed here: when the press is in the tank for a candidate and is not fair and balanced, everyone loses.
anyone claiming it didn't happen are shooting yourselves in the foot by justifying what happened with the press, because at the end of the day the press will turn on Obama, it always does to the standing president, and when they do its going to be comical watching everyone freak out at the "unfairness". i'll be the guy with the popcorn laughing...
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Re:Duh. (Score:5, Insightful)
and no I'm not making it up: 3 channels are owned by his son, while the public tv has given hope of being impartial and has been divided among major parties.
It's thousands times better to have genuine biased press (in both ways) than to have our illusion of freedom in speech.
Parent
Re:Duh. (Score:5, Insightful)
I find it comical that you actually missed the point. Whenever something like this happens, it's a great time to ask why the press would be biased like this. There are news outlets with known liberal biases (MSNBC) and conservative biases (Fox), but for the most part, they all fall somewhere around the center and try to keep it there. We should then ask - what causes a respected news outlet like the post to run more articles for one candidate - I don't think it was a conscious decision, especially with the relatively small margins of difference between them.
I think GP hit it on the head. The newspapers will write articles that sell - one campaign's rhetoric was negative, and one was positive. In this campaign, positive was what sold. Why then, is it so surprising to hear that one news outlet featured him in more articles? It's not.
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Re:Duh. (Score:5, Insightful)
although by the standards of much of europe almost all american news stations are right wing.
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Re:Duh. (Score:5, Interesting)
Also although I agree that Obama's message did strike a chord and McCain's messages were largely negative, in all fairness McCain had lots of positive messages but they were flatly refused to be reported. The new outlets only mentioned his negative stuff. Obama had *lots* of attacks on McCain but he was getting a lot more coverage so it didnt appear as if thats all he was saying.
Parent
Re:Duh. (Score:5, Interesting)
Also although I agree that Obama's message did strike a chord and McCain's messages were largely negative, in all fairness McCain had lots of positive messages but they were flatly refused to be reported.
If we're doing things in all fairness, then I should also point out that there's a difference between "McCain/Obama" ads and ads run by "McCain/Obama" supporters.
A lot of negative ads run against McCain/Obama were not directly from McCain/Obama but supporters of McCain/Obama.
Then, of course, we need to talk about money. When one side spends 3/4 to 1 on ads (Obama to McCain), it gives them a lot better ability to change their ratio of positive/negative advertising.
If, for example, McCain ran 10 negative ads and 10 positive ads and Obama runs 15 negative ads but 40 positive ads, Obama has actually run more negative ads but at a smaller ratio.
Hehe, maybe that's why the major media outlets loved him? He gave them a ton of money in advertisement.
Parent
The 2008 post-election drinking game (Score:5, Funny)
2) Replace Bush with Obama, and post to FreeRepublic
3) Drink a shot everytime someone replies positively
4) Die of alcohol poisoning
Irony laden fun for the whole family.
Nice example of non-symmetry on Bill Maher (Score:5, Interesting)
He showed McCain's 2008 concession speech: boos from the republican crowd.
He then showed Kerry's 2004 concession speech: no boos from the democratic crowd.
Notice how it's the right always claiming that the other side is just as bad as they are. Authoritarians: it's not bad/illegal when WE do it!
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Not really biased (Score:5, Insightful)
I don't see this as evidence of bias on the part of reporters, I see it at evidence of the Democratic Primary running as long as it did.
Also, the Republican campaign(s) threw a lot of mud which of course prompted coverage. If Mccain hadn't put Obama in the news so much, he wouldn't have been in the new so much. If the accusations had more merit the resulting coverage wouldn't have been as positive as it was.
Insightful (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:Insightful (Score:5, Insightful)
In other words there were more positive stories on Obama because there was more positive stuff to say about him.
Yeah, that makes sense. Hopefully tallies with him winning too ;-)
Justin.
A Brit.
Parent
I wouldn't know (Score:5, Insightful)
I ditched the TV 20 years ago, and the newspaper 5 years ago. I don't understand why anyone listens to the "main stream media" anymore. My in-laws think everything they see on TV "news" is Gospel, however.
The goal of the media isnt to report (Score:5, Insightful)
So its no surprise Obama had more favorabe coverage. He was by far the 'sexier' candidate.
(Tho Palin was hotter)
Palin? (Score:5, Insightful)
Do the numbers factor in Sarah Palin at all? I'm too lazy to sign up for the Post.
She was in the news quite a bit, at least a HECK of a lot more than Biden. I'm not saying her press was "good" but there was a lot of it.
Comparing Obama+Biden vs McCain+Palin probably results in closer numbers.
Besides, are we really surprised? Obama running as the Democrat nominee was history in the making. Of course he would get more press.
Overseas coverage (Score:5, Informative)
I can't speak for other countries, but that was certainly the case here in Australia - Obama was being discussed as if he were already president, and McCain was rarely mentioned (the Americans being interviewed had to keep reminding the Australian reporters that McCain even existed). Perhaps it has something to do with the excitement of the possibility of the first black president, or perhaps the political alignment of Australia made us favour Obama, who knows?
Favouring... (Score:5, Interesting)
Bush had a good run in the media especially in making "the case" in the war against Iraq. He got a nice handshake from the mainstream media then, but when the shoe is on the other foot it's like the end of the world. Besides, the Republicans got so unpopular after two Bush terms it would be hard enough ramming the same trash down people's throats again.
To quote Colbert... (Score:5, Insightful)
..."Reality has a strong liberal bias."
My take on this is that Obama's candidacy and success were in fact more newsworthy than McCain's. Obama changed the game in a lot of ways, both in terms of who he is and how he ran. McCain was more of a known quantity to begin with, and ran a fairly ordinary race. In fact, the most remarkable thing about McCain's campaign (apart from the stunt-casting VP pick, which generated plenty of news)was that it was so painfully typical, where McCain used to do things more his own way.
In short, if McCain had made more news, he might have gotten more headlines. Instead, he was mostly yesterday's news.
Horrors!! Being positive causes positive coverage (Score:5, Insightful)
Why, then, are we expecting that the bizarre campaign of a man who is a shadow of who he was running with an uninformed hatemonger and which wants to continue
would get as much positive press as a smooth campaign by two qualified candidates running on a platform of
Sometimes the reason the story is positive is because the subject is positive.
When someone doesn't say anything... (Score:5, Insightful)
If you have watched the campaigns of both McCain and Obama, there is also a clear difference in what has been said on both sides. It was even more clear for the month leading up to the election.
The Obama campaign has spent the most time saying what Barack Obama felt were the solutions to the problems, and talking about the problems out there. There was very little McCain/Palin bashing from the campaign. It may have been the press coverage, but I didn't see the Obama camp really stirring up anti-McCain feelings with fairly few advertisements saying why people should not vote for McCain.
On the other hand, EVERY rally that McCain and Palin were at showed no solutions, just reasons why they said not to vote for Obama. This shows why McCain lost, because he didn't show he was focused on why people should vote for him.
So, in the press, why should they cover, "Republican candidate bashes Obama but says nothing about how to deal with the issues" day in and day out? If McCain was more presidential BEFORE his concession speech, he would have done better.
Also, when a candidate ONLY focuses on his/her "base", it makes anyone not in that group feel that there is no reason to support that person. If people in the press have a normal bias toward a more moderate to liberal candidate, then those who are focused on ONLY targeting the conservative people, it just makes for there being no real news if that conservative candidate doesn't say anything new.
Did McCain EVER talk about having real solutions, or just how people should be afraid of having Obama as president?
Wasted away again in Freeperville (Score:5, Insightful)
The young, photogenic, would-be first black President gets more attention than the puffy old white guy? Say it ain't so, America, say it ain't so!
Of course, this is also easily explained by the fact that reality has a liberal bias.
Drug use?! (Score:5, Informative)
Oh, and when asked about his drug use back in October 2006 said "Of course I inhaled. That was the point" [blogspot.com]. On video [politics.com].
No, I have no idea why the media would not want to spend reporting resources and column inches covering this repeatedly.
And would you agree that Obama has been far more open about his illegal substance abuse than certain other presidents [wikipedia.org]?
Re:No surprise (Score:5, Informative)
The media (with the exception of Fox News) has always had a pretty large liberal bias.
Really? To the rest of the world (or at least western Europe), even 'left wing' American newspapers appear hilariously conservative.
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Re:No surprise (Score:5, Insightful)
Compare the CNN to the CBC in Canada and you'd swear Canada is a quasi-Socialist country!
The CNN only 'appears' to be left-biased because the rest of the media is actually right-biased. In my eye, the CNN is quite centrist.
I don't think there really is a media outlet with a left-bias in the US... But I'm speaking as a Canadian with only a passing interest in American politics.
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Re:No surprise (Score:5, Interesting)
Sometimes, I really wonder if any of you people "get out" and "see the world".
You want liberal bias? Watch or listen to PBS/NPR?
Although that said, it was NPRs in depth coverage of who Obama
actually is and where he actually came from that started to
demystify him considerably. If you scratch beneath the surface
he seems a lot less unreal (imagine that).
This is a good example of how journalists should be providing
a lot of useful information, so much so that there's enough
real information there to allow the audience to make up their
own mind and counteract whatever bias might be obvious in those
presenting it.
Enough information will eventually destroy all bias.
Of course Americans tend to be lazy and generally anti-intellectual.
So if the news is anything more than a sound bit or two it might just
get filtered out. Commercial media has to account for this.
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Re:No surprise (Score:5, Interesting)
To the US, much of Western Europe (minus perhaps the BBC) appears hilariously liberal - this coming from a regular reader of the NY Times (and who lives in New York) and someone who voted for Obama.
I do emphasize 'appears,' though, because I don't think this necessarily means there is a bias on the part of the reporters or the editors. By any objective measure I can think of, Obama was incredibly newsworthy. I wanted to vote for McCain (I'm a small business owner) but I couldn't stomach Palin; still, McCain received plenty of coverage around here. I think that the newspapers do their best to report stuff that they think is newsworthy, and having some arbitrary rule like 'we must publish an equal number of pieces about each candidate' is the type of gesture-laden but meaningless decision that is all too regular these days -- and it would ultimately result in fluff pieces or lowering the standards of what makes the news just so you get an even count.
My biggest beef with the NY Times is that, particularly since Obama was elected, it's been piece after piece about the 'barrier-breaking' historical significance of the event; the guy has gotten a big pass on making substantive policy statements just because he's such a 'game-changer.' I don't mean to take away the gravitas of the historical situation, but I think we've been congratulating ourselves so much on our enlightened stance that we've indirectly said that, had we elected McCain instead, it would've been nothing more than backwards racism at work (since electing Obama was so forward-thinking of us). We get quotes from people around the world like 'There is the feeling that for the first time since Kennedy, America has a different type of leader' (http://thecaucus.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/11/05/reactions-from-around-the-world/?scp=3&sq=america%20president%20rest%20of%20world%20follow&st=cse) and similar comments praising the basic fact of the event itself.
So it comes as no surprise to me that McCain would have to work twice as hard to get attention from such a 'landmark' event. I like and respect Obama, and I'm very interested to see how he'll do - but I think we let him skate by, particularly in the debates, with a lot of vague promises. I'll celebrate him being a game-changer once the game has actually changed.
As for your original point, though, a (more liberal) friend of mine pointed out that, even in spite of the semi-regular absence of substance -- these were campaign promises, after all, and he's hardly alone in making vague ones -- there is an unavoidable perk in our reputation abroad not because Obama is a proven diplomat (he isn't) but because he's not George Bush and not a Republican.
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Small business owner? Don't vote conservative (Score:5, Interesting)
I wanted to vote for McCain (I'm a small business owner)
That would have been a mistake. Unless your business is insanely profitable, you would've gained nothing from McCain. His health insurance plan, for instance, would have been a disaster for everyone but insurance companies. In general, conservative policies are only good for big business and the investor class.
We've had the same BS with Sarkozy here; he claims he's pro-business, but his fiscal measures only profited the wealthiest. And most small business owners aren't that rich. In particular, just like McCain's plan, he targeted income tax; if your small biz is incorporated, as it should be (mine is!), this makes no difference at all to the business itself. It only matters when you've made so much money that you are going to pay yourself.
And if you don't want to pay that income tax, just invest that surplus money into expanding the business. Corollary: with decreasing income tax, it becomes more attractive for the small biz owner to just take more of the profits, instead of investing and hiring.
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Re:No surprise (Score:5, Insightful)
Really? To the rest of the world (or at least western Europe)
Amerocentrism bad, eurocentrism good!
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Re:No surprise (Score:5, Informative)
Why was this marked Troll? I find it a very valid statement.
Because it was loaded down with hyperbole and violated Godwin's law?
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Re:No surprise (Score:5, Insightful)
Except they didn't...
Even in their own countries people opposed those dictators. Some didn't even know (their own fault in part I admit) the extent of the evil those men did. Most people were bystanders, who might have done something, but choose to stand aside because they didn't want to have their families hurt.
And seriously, how is four men, from four countries, "most of the world"? A large part of the rest of the world fought against them you know?
Not to count how the heck you can justify such a statement and how it relates to modern European and worldwide sensibilities, when most European countries are social-democrats, when those countries that lived under such monsters are now stable democracies (Russia excluded). Maybe you should pay more attention to what goes on in the world now, instead of wearing your post-WW2 rose-tinted Made in USA glasses (hint: they're Made in China now).
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Re:No surprise (Score:5, Insightful)
A story about an American newspaper, dealing with American politics, and an American scale of liberal/conservative bias has nothing to do with the rest of the world.
i only wish that were true. the fact that you think it is only goes to highlight how ignorant some americans are about the ramifications of the behaviour of their government with regards to everyone else in the world. I'll clue you in. THEY'RE [wikipedia.org] MASSIVE [wikipedia.org]. And the behaviour of your government can only be influenced by the will of the american populace - so your attitudes as reflected through your media are of great interest to everyone else in the world.
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It's in the article. (Score:5, Insightful)
That's not "a pretty large liberal bias".
That is the Washington Post focusing on the easiest stories to "write". The ones that don't require any research. The ones that don't require any knowledge of the issues.
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Re:It's in the article. (Score:5, Insightful)
That's not "a pretty large liberal bias".
That is the Washington Post focusing on the easiest stories to "write". The ones that don't require any research. The ones that don't require any knowledge of the issues.
Add to that - the ones people wanted to read
Parent
That's possible. (Score:5, Insightful)
But the reactions here (on Slashdot) to articles about the candidates various technological positions did seem to do fairly well from a "number of comments" point of view.
I'd say that this is more a matter of the same phenomena that we see in every election now. The "pundits" talk about whatever is easiest for them to talk about. And they're words get coverage because it's easier for the "reporters" to just regurgitate whatever they've heard.
So, rather than research a subject and ask INFORMED questions of the candidates THEMSELVES we get the topic de jour from the pundits, then echoed by the reporters, then echoed by other reporters and then echoed by other pundits. Since all of the pundits and reporters are talking about it, it MUST be an important issue, right?
I think that is why we saw so many websites pop up this election that did independent fact-checking of the candidates' public statements.
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Re:No surprise (Score:5, Insightful)
Meh.
You often hear hard-right folks complaining about liberal media bias. And I also often hear hard-left folks whining about the media's conservative bias.
Here's the reality: the media is fairly centrist, vaguely center-left. Obama isn't a hard-left liberal. He's pretty much center-left. Most voters are vaguely center-right, with a significant center-left contingent. The folks that complain the loudest are usually either hard-left, hard-right or some minority political position.
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Re:No surprise (Score:5, Funny)
Is there any surprise? The media (with the exception of Fox News) has always had a pretty large liberal bias.
Having said that, Obama is young, charismatic, and is promoting the change America wants. He would have won either way.
Reality has a well-known liberal bias!
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Re:No surprise (Score:5, Insightful)
I voted McCain; I was (and am) a fan of the pork-barrel spending cuts he wanted to implement
So what are you going to do to solve the other 98% of the Federal budget deficit after you get rid of earmarks? And what's pork? Most Americans would view stuff that their own Congressman brings home as "economic development" and stuff that the other 434 bring home as "pork". Might it just be that some earmarks actually serve a valid purpose and that purpose is lost somewhere in all the discussion about the abuse and excess?
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Re:No surprise (Score:5, Interesting)
But then the "red" states would suffer. You see, they take from the economically more productive "blue" states, on average. It is ironic that the GOP whines about income redistribution, when their states benefit from it.
http://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/fortune_archive/2004/11/29/8192719/index.htm [cnn.com]
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Re:Obama will be Vladimir Putin's bitch. (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:No surprise (Score:5, Insightful)
The guy who makes my sandwich at lunch for minimum wage works harder than I do. Maybe he didn't work as hard in school, or isn't as smart or whatever, but you know, somebody has to make the sandwiches. I personally appreciate the people who do that (or who take out the trash, mow the grass at the park, etc). I don't mind paying 4% higher taxes so that they can be taken care of when they get brain cancer or something.
Conservatives need to get over this nonsense idea that rich business owners are the hardest-working members of society and the only ones who deserve all the perks. My salary is not determined entirely by how hard I work; a large part involves market forces outside my control. I'd be a moron to not realize that I'm at least a little bit lucky. This argument over who is working the hardest does not favor the wealthy.
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Re:No surprise (Score:5, Insightful)
Plenty of Fox commentators don't announce their political views (unsurprisingly, given apparently many of them are liberals who are paid to push a conservative agenda. The left has been using the term "Media Whore" for a while to describe these people, not just on Fox but on many of the other networks too, especially in the period from 1998-2003 where every news network was slanted so far to the right it's surprising the nation's TVs didn't topple over), and plenty of non-Fox commentators do. Some, like Chris Matthews, claim they're liberal (though spent the entire Clinton administration attacking him, voted for Bush, and supported Fred Thompson for President this time to a level many consider homo-erotic), others like Ken Olbermann and Phil Donahue have never made any secret of their liberalism.
The real issue with Fox is that it doesn't try to be balanced. It has few commentators that attempt to find the truth and report it. It does, occasionally, have some very strong journalists - Shepard Smith would spring to mind, but as a network it plugs a right wing agenda, distorts the news by over-reporting anti-liberal reports and under-reporting anti-conservative or pro-liberal reports, and promotes divisiveness and hatred. One black panther dominated Fox on election day. Prior to that bogus claims of election fraud were levelled against an anti-poverty group, so successfully the right still thinks ACORN was the aggressor, not the victim, and many on the right think ACORN was actually submitting votes rather than registrations. Ashley Todd's story was reported when Fox believed it, and then virtually wiped off the network when it became clear it was a hoax. I'm really not finding any evidence any of the other networks acted that way.
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Do not try to bring up "fair". (Score:5, Insightful)
Here's a personal account of an election worker in Iowa dealing with voter "purges":
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/11/10/precinct_elections_official/ [theregister.co.uk]
Do not start talking about "fair" without also addressing those purges.
And from TFA:
So you're talking about a difference of 160 stories. Over almost a year. Let's just call it a year. That means we're talking about a difference of less than 1 story every two days.
Meanwhile, McCain's 786 stories equates to just over 2 stories every day for a year.
Compared to Obama's 946 which equates to ... just over 2 stories every day for a year.
But every THIRD day, Obama would get THREE stories and McCain would only get TWO stories.
Yeah, and you're going to complain about the press "favored" Obama?
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Re:Do not try to bring up "fair". (Score:5, Insightful)
Number of stories is a pretty silly metric anyway. There was a great bit in a Jeffery Archer book (First Among Equals, I think) explaining how the press got around equal coverage laws to favour a particular candidate. If their opposition was not photogenic, they would use the column-inches for photos, not for text. If they said particularly silly things, they would use the space to report quotes.
You can report an inane remark by Palin and an inspiring speech by Obama and get the same number of stories. You can report Obama's preacher saying 'God damn America!' and McCain talking about reducing corruption, and get the same number of stories. On a more subtle level, you can talk about Obama wanting universal healthcare in a publication with a primarily liberal readership, and it's a positive story, but run the same story in a publication with a libertarian readership and it's negative.
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Re:Another group of people favored Obama... (Score:5, Insightful)
FWIW: historically, when there is a serious economic downturn in an election year, the incumbent's party will lose. It does not matter if the incumbent is Democrat or Republican; voters often want change.
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That's the cardinal problem with these surveys (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:World Domination (Score:5, Informative)
Then it dawned on me. Thanks to satellite TV, now the whole world can watch US TV news.
Satellite makes it easier, but it's been a basically like this for way longer than that, and teh reasons run much deeper:
The point is that as the only superpower (or until recently one of two and everyone's ally unless you were already run by the soviets), what America does _matters_. Directly. To just about everyone. So if you know what's good for you, you better get wise about what it's doing.
Also, most countries are smaller and not spoilt with this kind of power themselves, they know that most of what "is happening" takes place outside your country, so even regular folks takes a certain interest in international affairs even beyond the superpowers, wheras in the US you don't really need to care much about what happens out side it, and are even encouraged to think that all that 'foreign stuff' is mainly irrelevant compared to what goes on in the US.
I'm European, but have lived in the US for a short while, and visited several times since, and I must say the dearth of international news (beyond whatever wars you guys are involved in at any given time) is simply shocking. The rest of us simply cannot afford to be that ignorant.
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Re:World Domination (Score:5, Informative)
Oh, and one more thing:
"Then I tried to think of cases in recent decades where world opinion differed significantly from the US media's dominant spin. I can't think of a single one."
Umm, there was this tiny little thing called Iraq, where basically noone agreed with you, or believed your claims of evidence. That might not be the impression you got from your domestic media, though.
International opinion was also much quicker to oppose the Vietnam war than the domestic majority.
We all laughed our asses off at how it is possible to let a president's fling almost overthrow the country.
I think you might find also find that international opinion on your christian right and neocons is far less accepting than in the US.
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