United Kingdom: Cameron falls hard for Obama

“What happens to our leaders when they travel to the U.S.?” asked Martin Townsend in the London Sunday Express. Somewhere over the Atlantic, our uptight, stodgy British prime minister—whoever it may be at the time—gets “replaced by a stand-in with a permanently dopey grin and a suitcase full of naff leisurewear.” During Prime Minister David Cameron’s visit to the U.S. last week, he acted like a “gooey schoolgirl” in Barack Obama’s presence. Presidents, of course, are experts at disarming us with their head games, first rolling out the red carpet and wowing us with pomp and bling, then getting flatteringly chummy with barbecue and back-slapping. “No wonder our prime ministers stumble through these visits with a look of stupefied confusion on their faces.”

The effect is not just hypnotic, but “dangerously intoxicating,” said Simon Jenkins in The Guardian. Tony Blair was so thoroughly seduced that he remained slavish not just to the president—Clinton, after all, was his first White House host—but to the presidency, famously becoming George W. Bush’s poodle. Cameron enjoyed five hours of one-on-one with Obama, and even got to fly on Air Force One. “Such a cocaine rush of power could lead Britain to become the 51st state.” Cameron was positively fawning, said Tony Parsons in the Mirror. “So desperate, so demeaning, so pathetically grateful—Cameron looked like a French tart in liberated Paris chasing after a GI.” Blair’s misguided devotion to what used to be called the “special relationship” got Britain embroiled in two of America’s wars. Will Cameron follow Obama into another?

Calm down, said Bagehot in The Economist. The British press always complains that the prime minister is “the supplicant” at the White House. This time, though, it was Obama who needed Cameron. How did he justify hauling the baffled prime minister to Ohio on his personal jet and plunking him down at a college basketball game? He said he wanted to show this foreign leader “the heartland” of America, the “great state” of Ohio. It was pure electioneering, shilling for votes in a swing state. “A British leader being used for a photo op by a sitting American president. I felt obscurely proud.”

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Don’t be, said Nile Gardiner in the Telegraph. Cameron not only let himself be “cynically wheeled out” as a campaign prop at that basketball game, but he also agreed to a state dinner that was just an excuse for Obama to reward his fund-raisers. Worse, he took that opportunity to give a toast that was so gushing in its praise as to be an endorsement of Obama’s re-election. Cameron actually compared him to Teddy Roosevelt. It was “a sad exercise in hero-worship before an extremely liberal White House that has taken every opportunity in the past to insult America’s closest friends across the Atlantic.”