Doom and gloom

Storm swissinfo.ch

The Economist described the 2012 US presidential contest as a “miserably negative campaign” in which Mitt Romney was depicted “as a devious, tax-dodging outsourcer, hell bent on raising taxes on the struggling middle class, gutting popular government programmes and undermining women’s rights”.

And Romney’s team portrayed Obama as “an unprincipled incompetent, who has allowed debt to balloon, jobs to evaporate, religious freedom to be trampled and the American dream to be eviscerated.”

News coverage of the presidential campaign has also been consistently negative, media researchers reported Friday.

Swissinfo.ch talked to Swiss-American voters from some of the key swing states – but they were not exactly oozing with enthusiasm about the candidates or the campaign.

David Sylvan, an American political scientist at the Geneva-based Graduate Institute, said he was not that surprised by the negativity of the 2012 campaign which many observers have been talking about. For him, the “incredible narrowness” of either sides political agenda and the ideological extremes of the Republicans were more startling. Hear more from him below,

David Sylvan analyses the US campaignsExternal link by swissinfo_englishExternal link