DEMOCRATIC PARTY’S NOMINATING PROCESS
Catonsville, MD, Monday, 12 May 2008

Arriving in the U.S., I find myself in the midst of the Democratic Party’s nominating process. Hillary Clinton looked like a shoo-in some six months ago and would probably have appeared to voters as a high-minded progressive candidate. Without a real opponent she would surely somehow have been able to gloss over the fact that she voted for the Patriot Acts, is a partisan advocate of Israel’s right-wing policies in Palestine and seems to base her foreign policy concepts on the same misguided, immoral and in the end ineffective militaristic/sole-superpower principles that have been the foundation of Bush-Cheney policies (and failures) abroad; the same precepts that now appear to be basis for McCain’s approach to the world.

Unfortunately, the more Obama caught up with her in the polls the more Ms. Clinton began to look just like every other common or garden variety, establishment hack; one not not at all above playing dirty tricks on an opponent. Ms. Clinton acted in fact like she had been entitled to the nomination. But she has seriously misjudged the mood in her party and, it appears now, the whole country.

Every country has two sides to its political life. But, while Bush/Cheney/Rumsfeld/Wolfowitz and, yes, John McCain, appeal to the dark side, Barack Obama plays to the better side of America’s political make-up. For those of us who have been in despair at the direction American foreign policy has been taking for years, at the intensification of these policies to a shameful level under George Bush II, Obama seems almost heaven-sent. He appears articulate and fair-minded and it is he in this primary campaign who always takes the high road in his utterances and actions. He might sometimes be accused of intellectual aloofness even though clearly he can mix it up with the Man-(if not the Woman-)in-the-Street at least as well as Hillary Clinton, and probably better even than McCain. The amazing thing is that, with his approach, Obama has built a ground-swell of support for his candidacy.

So there is a better side to American politics! Ms. Clinton has made herself look cheap and opportunistic. Even though at this point she has not abandoned the race, it's surely all over but the cheering; Obama has already started to run against John McSame, the presumed Republican Party candidate under the assumption that the clash of these two men will be the main event in 2008.

Hillary Clinton might have been a great President or at least a great presidential candidate. She appeals to working class voters and older women, the latter who want at last to see their campaign for equality with men take symbolic fruition in a woman president, a national leader who will complete the process. But, as one female friend said, “Of course I want to see a female president; just not this one!” She was aware that feminist voters alone would not carry her to the White House. She was wooing working class voters (both black and white, by the way)with policies to redress the erosion of their exconomic situation so eroded under nearly thirty years of Republican or "Republican Lite" taxation and other policies. Ironically, some of these programmes (welfare reform, NAFTA, to name only two) were instituted by her husband during the period when Ms. Clinton claims she (sic) was gaining executive experience in the White House.

The Democrats are fortunate to have two such strong contenders; that’s speaks for the party. Compare the Democrats to the Republicans with their field of hard-arsed, know-nothing arrogant politicos like Giuli-Annie, Huckebilly and McSame, all trying to out-do George W. Bush in keeping the wogs in line overseas while at home pandering to their clientele in corporate board rooms and continuing to impoverish the majority of voters. That said, however, The Clinstones (one supposes that Bill Clinton would be de facto Vice-President in a Clinton II administration) now unfortunately seem so much like “Yesterday’s Men” (feminists should excuse the expression) by comparison to Obama who carries the aspirations of many new voters and not just the black and the young.

McSame

The real campaign i.e., the one against the Republicans, is just getting started. Not least because McCain will have to distance himself from the worst president in modern history, and because the race is going to be close, expect dirty tricks at every step as we have seen in the past. McCain is anything but electrifying. I had read a lot about him before returning to TV Land; on TV he definitely underwhelms. He portrays himself as the conservative heir to the Reagan crown. But this is disputed by the seriously conservative wing of the Republican Party who think McCain is an opportunist and four-square on nearly nothing. And without the right-right-wing constituency, which includes the evangelical mullahs, it is hard to imagine that he can win the presidency. NASCAR Dads and the corporations can’t be sufficient.

Indeed, everyone here now seems to believe that it is going to be the Year of the Democrats. Maybe so; maybe not; not too many months ago Ms. Clinton neded only to approach the throne to have the orb placed in her hand and the chism painted on her forehead. Even a few weeks in politics is a long time.

On television at least, McCain seems plodding and none to bright. Maybe that will be his main appeal, that and his 35-year-old and questionable war-hero persona (he was a POW in Vietnam for several years and admits that he freely gave information to his captors). Curiously, while the economy is going to hell in a handcart, the confesses he does not understand economics; his views about prolonging and expanding the imperialist war(s) overseas have already been repudiated by the electorate in the mid-terms. He still has a few reliable old knee-jerk issues such as “apolitical supreme court judges” (a joke considering how political GWB’s appointments have been, and that earlier conservative justices handed him a presidential election in 2008); “less government” (when Americans have government sticking its nose into every aspect of their lives under the pretext of combating terrorism at home); and "lower taxes" (only possible surely by either reducing military spending, increasing taxes or dismantling Social Security and Medicaid/Medicare the latter at a time when Social Security is neither unpopular nor at present seriously endangered financially, and in a year when universal healthcare’s historical moment seems finally to have arrived).

“Nice, but none-too-bright” and even “plodding” have of course never been absolute barriers to presidential aspirations or achievement. Harding, Hoover, Truman and Reagan rode to power on such unlikely nags. George W. Bush did “plodding" and "none-to-bright, but nice” extremely well in electoral terms. Some pundits say they are exactly the reason he got half the vote in two close races. (He got close to 50% of the actual votes in both of the last two federal elections, so a rough half of those who went to the polling stations those two times thought he was good enough for the job.) The ranks of his supporters are thinning perhaps, but there are still people - even on this planet - who think the best thing that ever happened to the Iraqi people was the American invasion and occupation and that unfettered market forces at home and globally are a guarantee of personal freedom.

My Prognoses

Everybody I talked to in 2000 and 2004 was going to vote “Democrat”, i.e., for Gore or Kerry. I concluded that Gore had it sewn up in 2000 and, although I was a little more careful in 2004, I was pretty sure from my personal soundings that Kerry would be occupying the white House by now. Laugh out loud!

So, at this early stage of what is these days now being called by the media the “General Election” campaign, I am only willing to predict two things (or maybe two and one-half). First, one of the candidates will win. But I will stick my neck half-out and say (s)he will win by only a whisker. Historically, the highest vote ever earned went to Nixon in his second, “landslide” election (63%). Ronald Reagan only got 60%, I think -of votes cast, not of eligible voters. So, a landslide is pretty seldom. Capturing the White House AND Congress is the trick. A defection of any consitutency dooms a candidate to perdition.

Dirty pool

It’s probably safe to say that just because it is going to be close again this year, we should expect dirty pool. This is my second confident prediction. Dirty pool is of course standard operating procedure with the modern Republican Party, fashioned and schooled as it is by strategists like Carl Rove and with ground-breaking intellectual insights from great political minds like that of Newt Gingrich and Rush Limbaugh. This year’s “Swift Boat” challenge has yet to be unveiled, but you know to a certainty that somebody has it waiting in his drawer. Moreover, there has been no substantive reform of the way electronic votes are counted since the last two elections. Of course, Democrats know these games too. The question at present is just how high-minded can or will Obama remain with the ring just within his grasp? He does not have the reputation for political expediency. But the stakes are big this time.

Take the Jeremiah Wright thing. Any impartial reader or viewer of the Reverend Jeremiah Wright’s sermons and TV appearances, for example, will find nothing there that seems unreasonable. The issues are strongly presented and argued there, of course. But they seem like core truths to me. The media on the other hand has looped so much out of context that, if you only watched TV, Mr. Wright must now seem to the generally ill-informed American voters rather like a black-American version of Muqtada al-Sadr, if they knew who al-Sadr is. After first trying to rise over the problem without outright condemnation of The Reverend Wright, everybody knew Obama wold to finally cast him into Outer Darkness for purely tactical political advantage. Obama at least had the character to look seriously pained as he did it; but pained because he was being watched doing something that was obviously politically expedient, or because he really was sadly in disagreement with an old friend? His gaze was constantly down to his right during his disavowal.

In a way it does not much matter since most of his supporters had forgiven him for it almost in advance, and even blame Wright for jeopardising Obama’s chances of entering Jerusalem in November on a white donkey followed by palm-waving young, black and/or liberal supporters.

The media

Oh yes! Television and the media! Following the campaigns here on TV or in the major newspapers will leave you very little the wiser about actual issues. Although the talking heads talk constantly about the candidates and ‘issues, I have yet to see any comparison in either the local Baltimore Sun (the newspaper delivered to our door here), on the online versions of national quality dailies or on any major TV channel (including PBS) of Clinton’s and Obama’s or McCain's opinions or plans on how to deal with the crisis in healthcare, the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, the bloated military-industrial complex or the serious structural problems in the economy - and I don’t mean just the housing bubble and the high price of gasoline, but more importantly: the long-term, large and ongoing deficits in trade, international financial flows and government budgeting; the dependence upon unstable and expensive foreign energy; the sad state of public education; the debilitatingly weak finances of government at every level; tax justice; etc.; etc. You can get some information on any of this stuff on the Web if you look long enough. But do not expect anything substantial from television or the newspapers. Only hours of babble, pseudo-debate and sound bites.(The closest to comparing hte candidates I have found is at www.procon.org. Sometimes candidates studiously avoid stances or have two at the same time.)

I guess I knew all this before. But after seeing no television or national newspapers for the past few years, it is a real shocker to re-discover how trite and misleading they really are.