How Obama Lost the Europe Primary WHAT a difference four years makes. Barack Obama may be the president of masterful inactivity, but an awful lot has changed under his watch, not least what Europe thinks of him. What has become clear, and what - given the views of Mitt Romney and the Republicans - will be true over the next term, is that the United States and Europe seem to occupy not just different continents, but different planets. We both see very different places when we look at the globe: we are struck by America's constant, furious obsession with the Middle East, the fond and venerable bearing of ancient grudges against the vestiges of Communism, the bizarre choice of friends and enemies. This, I hasten to add, isn't a comparative value judgment; Europe has no monopoly on right thinking or clear viewing. Partly for that reason, this election has met with barely a shrug of interest in Europe; it hardly makes the front pages or the broadcast news. Four years ago we sat rapt on the edge of our seats. Remember Mr. Obama's 2009 visit to Berlin? The huge adoring crowds that evoked the ghost of John F. Kennedy and "Ich bin ein Berliner"? Today he'd be lucky to fill a bus with Teutonic fans or, if they did appear, to be heard over their guttural jeering. The disappointment that all Americans may be harboring over the Obama term is nothing compared with the garland-wrenching grief in Europe. It's not the disappointment; it's the hope we can't bear. There was a feeling that for the first time in a generation there might be a president who was the sort of American Europeans yearned to love. He seemed to have a very European perspective: his non-establishment background, his cadence, the liberality all promised to be one-worldy. After George W. Bush - possibly the most unpopular president since Richard M. Nixon - he was the fresh air from the West that everybody craved. He would be the leader of the free world that the free world could respect in difficult times. Then it happened. It, meaning nothing. The first thing that didn't happen was the closing of the prison at Guantánamo Bay. Then, the cessation of drone strikes didn't happen. Then, any serious movement on the Palestinian question or the attempt to curb the bellicosely right-wing Israeli government didn't happen. All that was galling, but what was really insufferable was that Mr. Obama never wrote, he never phoned, he never sent flowers or asked what we'd like, or if we had a beverage preference. He plainly didn't care about Europe, and he didn't care to pretend that he cared, which of course would have been the European diplomatic option. Mr. Obama's coolness, his inability or unwillingness to project warmth, to compliment those who felt insecure, or for whom a pat on the back or a mention, a mere mention, would mean a great deal, is the most inexplicable snub seen from Europe, where etiquette and insincerity are social skills. But there is a more fundamental problem between Western Europe and America. We may be linked by a belief in a free society and a popularly answerable government, but our democracies don't mesh - not simply the systems, but the parties. In Europe, the gamut of electable politicians is pretty much the same in every country, but there is no European equivalent to the Republican Party, not until you get to Hungary or Serbia. Democrats would partially overlap with conservatives or Christian Democrats here, but the absence of any sort of electable socialist movement in America is a constant subject of incomprehension. We believe the left wing is always a necessary element in the balance of democracy. But the idea that a democratic president could want to disengage with the rest of the world and to retreat to fortress America, to pull up the drawbridge on a messy world, is the most inexplicably wounding thing of all. Meanwhile, the Republicans would want to get involved with the rest of us only to lay down the law and protect American interests and biblical Israel. And despite such aggressive lack of interest, the American public seems not to care; if anything, it seems to prefer its politicians not talk too much about the world beyond its borders. Here, then, is the one place where the Old and New Worlds might collide: they both face a democratic deficit. Fewer and fewer people on either side of the Atlantic care to vote for anyone at all. In fact, the thing that may unite Europeans and Americans more than anything else is a collective dismissal of democracy, and a plague on the houses of all politicians. A. A. Gill is a contributing writer for Vanity Fair and The Sunday Times of London.