Kandidáti nemají důvod upírat pozornost na témata typu napjaté transatlantické aliance, která do povědomí průměrného voliče proniknou jen zřídkakdy, pokud vůbec. Obamova neschopnost svolat jedinou politickou schůzi senátního podvýboru pro Evropu, jemuž předsedá (a který mimo jiné dohlíží na americké vztahy s NATO a EU), měla mezi voliči absolutně nulovou odezvu.
Relations between the US and Europe have gone virtually unmentioned in the dozens of Presidential debates held over the past six months. This is not surprising. Candidates have no incentive to focus attention on a subject, such as the strained Atlantic Alliance, that seldom if ever enters the consciousness of the average voter. Obama’s failure to convene a single policy meeting of the Senate European sub-committee which he chairs (a committee that oversees, among other things, US relations with NATO and the EU) has had absolutely zero resonance among the electorate at large. When the topic arises, the Republican candidates, for their part, seem less blandly indifferent than overtly hostile to Europe. Their anti-European animus, while crudely uninformed, reflects, among other factors, the scorn for secularism typical of Southern white evangelicals and the perverse notion promulgated by some distinguished Republican defense intellectuals that Europe today can contribute little or nothing to American security.