Political observers from outside the United States were contemptuous. German correspondent Mario Dederichs said, “The discussion here [in America] is so shallow that sometimes Europeans really feel that there is a loss of reality here in the whole political discussion.” BBC reporter Gavin Esler explained, “When you have a campaign in which people can take comments about Murphy Brown, a fictitious character’s pregnancy seriously—they seriously discuss this—it strikes most Europeans as utterly bizarre.”
