Global Strategy - blog

Why the Europeans will miss Bush? An Obama presidency will be greeted in Europe with enthusiasm, but as some Europeans have put it to me, "We realize that we won't have the excuse of George Bush."...  [Obama is] going to want Europe to stand up and do more... And Europeans will have a problem, in that they will embrace him, and they will not be able to say: "Well, this is the Bush administration. We have to resist."

-- Daniel Fried, US State Department. In "Welcome to My World, Barack", The New York Times Magazine, November 15, 2008, p.48

As implied in the above extract, European politicians will face a challenge after president Bush is gone: Resistance to policies coming from the US cannot be justified any more just on the simple grounds that they are Bushian.

This might be a challenge particularly for social democratic and left-wing parties in Europe (including Nordic countries) -- in case they have justified their resistance to certain taxing policies or market liberalization projects (or international collaboration projects) on the grounds that those policies/projects are Bushian ones, i.e., with the negative aura surrounding the US president. 

Now, if it turns out that many of Obama's policies will not be that different from those of Bush's (at least not from European perspective), European social democrats and left-wing parties will likely be wise enough not to justify resistance to those policies on the grounds of them being Obamian. This is because Obama enjoys such a positive aura among normal people and citizens in Europea. But it also means that the politicians have to come up with new justifications..

Read more about the issue in another article of mine (in Finnish).