Nick Clegg – More popular than John McCain (in America)

Foreign wars and General Elections

From a young age I was told by my father that foreign wars existed to teach Americans geography. I suppose what he was trying to say is that Americans tend to limit their interest to their own country, unless something is at stake.

It’s clear enough that as the General Election campaign drags on, British politics will stay under the magnifying glass at home. But are people in the US taking as much interest in our TV debates, blogs, partisan newspapers and politicians as we took in Obama’s and his election 18 months ago?

Nick Clegg and John McCain

Here’s a useful graph from Google that suggests that they are. Collecting together data from the past month you can see that the search terms “David Cameron”, “Gordon Brown” and “Nick Clegg” are generating around about the same interest in the US as is “John McCain.”

Click on the image below to enlarge

No Cameron, No Brown

In fact, in the days following the first leaders’ debate on 15 April, the first mass-search data for Nick Clegg was recorded and in the days that followed he remained – off and on – more popular than the old republican.

This suggests a couple of things. Firstly that Clegg was relatively unknown across the Atlantic a week ago, and – secondly – that people have been interested enough in him to type his name into Google.

12 days after that first leaders’ debate Nick Clegg is still generating more searches in the US than Gordon Brown or David Cameron, which in itself is a curious fact. In fact, Google searches for Cameron and Brown have tailed off completely – leaving Clegg and McCain up there on their own.

Perhaps we don’t need to have wars to get Americans interested in other countries after all. A General Election might just do.

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Image credit: 1Flatworld