Even candidates whose campaigns are focused on local isues were eager to show off their international credentials on Tuesday night. "I lived in Japan for three years. I speak the language," said Daniel Seals, a 34-year-old African-American from Chicago (billed in advance of his call to the Paris crowd as possibly the next Barack Obama) who is trying to unseat Mark Kirk, the three-term Republican representative from Illinois' 10th Congressional District, in the city's tony North Shore suburbs. To the Americans in Europe, Seals was pitch-perfect, insisting that "Rumsfeld needs to go" and saying that it was time to overhaul energy policies, since "we are putting billions of tax dollars into supporting the oil companies."
On a day when the Mark Foley scandal dominated the news back home, here Iraq was the focus. Every candidate vowed to set a rapid exit strategy for troops if elected — a message that brought predicable cheers. "We need to bring this to a resolution as quickly as possible," said Seals of the war. Calling from his campaign office in Rhode Island, Sheldon Whitehouse, who has pulled ahead of Republican Sen. Lincoln Chafee in some polls, said, "From the earliest days I've called for bringing troops home." And one of the few moments of hushed silence came when Peter Welch, a Vermont attorney challenging Martha Rainville, a Republican, for the state's only seat in the House of Representatives, told the audience that a young man had "snuck" into his campaign office in August and dropped an envelope on the table. "He was active-duty National Guard, and he was about to be redeployed next morning to Iraq," said Welch. "He left a $1,000 check and a note saying: 'Please do everything you can to bring this terrible war to an end.'" Applause broke the silence.
Among the writers, retired lawyers, bankers and a handful of younger Americans in the Paris living room, the Democratic Party's prospects looked impossibly bright. That perspective seemed distorted even to the event's host, Constance Borde, the kinetic head of the France chapter of Democrats Abroad. The organization's mailing list of about 2,500 Americans living in France includes hundreds of people who moved to Paris decades ago, fell in love with the city, and never left. "These people are totally ideologically out of touch," she said. "They don't realize how conservative America has become." (George Yates, a displaced San Francisco attorney who runs the France chapter of the Republicans Abroad, estimates his group has only "about 200" supporters, suggesting that the American expatriates here are largely Democrat. The Republicans in France "tend to be a little less vocal in terms of waving the flag in the streets" than Democrats, he said.)
it's perfectly OK to wave a US flag in France in a demonstration - my annotationIt took a dose of straight talk from McCaskill — a fourth-generation Missourian who was her high school Pep Club president and Homecoming Queen — to inject a note of reality. Asked if she would win endorsements from the Kansas City Star and the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, she laughed. "This isn't about St. Louis and Kansas City," she said. "It's about rural Missouri. The challenge is on gay marriage, abortion. That's what we're up against." With another weary sigh, she added: "The problem we have as Democrats is that so many of the leaders come from the very, very blue states," she says. "They go home to the echo chamber. They never go to places like Missouri." But if you're a voter in Europe, Missouri can now come to you. http://www.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,1542712-2,00.html
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