The latest outrageous Republican stunt and its reception in Europe
The US election was front page news in many of the Sunday papers in Europe this week, and there were extended stories in today’s Financial Times. This week’s Economist came out in support of Obama. The Sunday Times of London had a fascinating story about how some Republicans had noticed some apparent similarities between the autobiography of Obama, and purported terrorist William Ayers (a well-established and respected professional, who was never convicted, and probably did not cause as much damage as Joschka Fischer, who was forgiven by the German people and currently serves as foreign minister).
The brother in law of a Republican congressman had contacted an Oxford scholar who does work in statistical analysis of authorship (a subject I’m mildly familiar with), and offered him $10,000 to prove that Obama’s autobio was actually ghost written by Ayers. Oxford agreed to take this on as a consulting project, with the stipulation that the results must be published, no matter which way they came out. At this point, the Republicans failed to cough up the 10 grand. Duh!
Perhaps unsurprisingly, Fox got this story wrong, reporting that congressman Cannon’s brother in law actually paid the $10K. A lengthy piece by Oxford professor Peter Millican in the Sunday Times indicated that he did not even have the opportunity to accept the money, because the offer was withdrawn after Oxford made it clear that the publishing of the results would not be conditional on Cannon’s hypothesis being proven.
I’m at an event in Cannes with a number of my co-workers from the US and Europe. One other Londoner was aware of this story about the attempt to use a computer to prove the Obama was a terrorist, but none of the Americans or Germans had picked up on it. One of the American analysts did announce, in front of several hundred co-workers, “If you are sick and tired of coverage of the election, DON’T come to Europe.”