The Rain in Spain Falls Mainly for McCain

This morning while I was getting my daily news fix I came across an announcement for an open chat session with a representative from the group Spain for McCain. Since I had no previous knowledge of the existence of such a group, I decided to check out their website to see what this was all about. Apparently, as the name would suggest, a group of Spanish citizens and American residents in Spain have formed this group to support the McCain campaign. From what I can tell, they sell t-shirts and buttons and try to convince Americans to vote for you know who. There isn’t much to their site, but if you go to the Nosotros section and scroll down you can find all sorts of interesting comments, some supportive of the group but most very much against it. For those of you who read Spanish, José María’s comment on Sept. 18 was fairly interesting. Writing from Miami, he explains that while many Spanish people equate the Spanish Partido Popular with the Republicans and the PSOE with the Democrats, this couldn’t be any further from the truth. He believes that most American Democrats would actually fall towards the right of the Spanish political spectrum and the Republicans would be considered extreme right. Hmm…

The most fascinating thing for me about this group is the fact that American citizens seem to play a very secondary role. The site is almost completely in Spanish and the key organizers seem to have devoted all of this time and effort into campaigning for a person they are not entitled to vote for. The only pro Obama organization I know of in Spain is Democrats Abroad and they, of course, are American citizens with a vote to cast. But Spain for McCain has a facebook account (Spain X McCain) and even a flickr page which shows a photo of an ecstatic, presumably Spanish guy with his arm around a John McCain cut out. Truly bizarre. The chat starts in about 10 minutes so I think I’ll check it out.