Some foreigners cheered what happened to Bill Clinton last week. "Glory hallelujah," beamed London's Daily Mail, "Americans would appear to be turning their backs on that very political correctness which in recent years has been their most pernicious transatlantic export."
Others expressed concern. "An anti-Democratic revolution has triumphed in America," concluded Izvestia, the closest thing Russia has to the New York Times. "Republicans have long been readying an attack on ... what, in their opinion, is a Russo- centric, East European-oriented administration." Commentators across the world saw the rout as a harbinger of bigger changes to come. Japan's Asahi Shimbun envisioned "the beginning of a cataclysmic structure from top to bottom." Added the Yomiuri Shimbun: "The Clinton administration could choose to become more unyielding on trade issues."
French radio commentator Marc Ullman sounded a theme repeated around the globe: "It wasn't a defeat. It was a disaster and a slap in the face of the first order for Clinton." Italy's La Stampa called it Clinton's "death sentence." The American president, said a TV interviewer on Britain's Sky News, "now looks not like a one-term president but a half-term president."
Israel's Maariv suggested that the problem was not Clinton's alone. "All the logic in the world doesn't help against a depressed national spirit that blames Washington for the ills of American society," it said. "Clinton is not to blame for that -- that the Americans have stopped loving themselves."
