If the images of 200,000-plus Berliners crowding to see Barack Obama seemed surprising to US observers, they shouldn’t have been. Outside the US, it’s hard to imagine why the US presidential election should even be close.

Environics: A massive majority of Canadians would like to see Senator Barack Obama
win the American presidential election to be held on November 4, 2008
according to a new national poll of 2,025 Canadians conducted by
Environics Research. This continues a pronounced trend among Canadians
over the past decade toward favouring Democratic presidential
candidates over Republicans.
The surveyshows that seven in ten Canadians (69%) would most like to
see Democratic Party candidate Barack Obama win the election, compared
to just 15 percent who would prefer to see Republican John McCain win
the election. Another 13 percent have no opinion or do not favour
either candidate, and two percent volunteer other candidates.

It wasn’t always the case that opinion was so lop-sided:

Environics founder Michael Adams noted: “If Canada had been a
state in the United States in 1988 and 1992, we would have been a swing
state. In the 2000 election, we would have voted like Vermont or
Massachusetts. This year, Canada as a whole would vote like inner city
Chicago.”

There was a time when the world might look to the US for political leadership. These days, we look at US politics in slack-jawed horror, and hope to hell that we can avoid the consequences of the lunacies it generates.