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".Despite Gore's lacklustre [ecological] record
riding shotgun for Bill Clinton, the vast majority of Democrats
will stick with him. Gore's great strengths are, first and
foremost, the booming economy with its stock-market driven
'wealth effect' and second, that he is not George W. Bush.."
(Dan Hamburg, former California Congressman and current Ralph
Nader supporter).
Writing recently on the upcoming US Presidential election
Pete
Smith offered up a snapshot of the various campaigns as they
were just beginning to unfold at the beginning of the year.
As Smith describes, the US media were saying that the George
W. Bush presidential campaign was rapidly approaching an
irresistible
force, awash in millions of advertising dollars, with an
astronomically large lead in the polls over Republican and
Democratic Party
contenders alike. (This was the "Media Coronation"
interlude.) The only cloudy patch on Bush's sky one could
even anticipate was the coming showdown with the billionaire
self-financing and all-around dirty player, Steve Forbes,
whose flat tax proposals were believed to be popular and whose
unprincipled attacks had done serious damage to former candidate
Bob Dole during the last election cycle.
At the same time as Bush was riding his juggernaut, over
in the Democratic Party camp, Al Gore's largely discounted
campaign had apparently stalled. Not only was Gore a million
miles behind the front runner in the polls, he was a terminally
boring and robot-like man, in serious need of a makeover and
facing a strong, even possibly lethal, challenge from the
left from former Senator and popular athlete Bill Bradley.
Gore, moreover, was trapped by his association with the Clinton
Administration.
Very little of this was even close to accurate. As of the
time of writing this, in mid-April, Bush has blown his former
25 point lead in the polls and is in a statistical dead heat
with Gore; he has also squandered most of the $70 million
war chest his advisers had earmarked for the summer propaganda
offensive. Steve Forbes was totally irrelevant, except insofar
as Bush had to propose his own regressive tax plan to counter
him.
Meanwhile, John McCain, barely on anyone's radar last December
until he replaced Bill Bradley as the media's darling, wiped
out the hapless Bush in the New Hampshire primary and then
beat him again in Michigan. One of McCain's selling points
in New Hampshire, amusingly enough, was to ridicule Bush's
massive tax cut programme as a giveaway to the rich. Of course
it is, but this is not usually the approach of Republican
candidates in Republican primary elections! In order to score
a victory over McCain in South Carolina Bush was forced spend
millions and utilize vicious whispering campaigns, push-polls
and other tactics so sleazy as to overshadow those of his
father against Michael Dukakis in 1988, heretofore a benchmark
of the genre.
As a result Bush ended up exactly where he didn't want to
be, publicly aligned with some of the ugliest creatures of
the Christian Right. This has made a joke of his "compassionate
conservative" image, among other things. To add to the
shambles, in recent days Bush has refused to coordinate his
campaign and his agenda with Congressional Republicans, and
many of the latter see no gain any longer in associating their
approaches with him or trying to ride his coattails, since
in most places there aren't any coattails to ride.
Even more bad news for Bush: despite the fact that Ross Perot's
Reform Party structurally has collapsed into a laughingstock
of control freaks and blowhards it still retains ballot status
and will receive federal funds worth millions for the November
election. Pat Buchanan will be the Presidential candidate
for Reform, and for the racists, anti-semites, the anti-abortionists
and the counterculture-bashers, the homophobic and the anti-immigration
activists in the Republican Party unwilling to mute themselves
through November, Our Pat offers a voice and a home. This
actually sets tight limits on any possible urge Bush may feel
to soften his approach on gays and abortion rights.
Meanwhile on the left, Ralph Nader is again standing for
the Green Party, albeit with a serious campaign this time.
He and the Greens claim a long-range perspective. His supporter
Dan Hamburg (quoted above) writes that not only do the Green
Party's campaign goals seem realistic in the long run, but
that Nader is "serious about the absolute necessity of
building a real alternative party of the left. If the state
Green Parties around the country coalesce around him, Nader
can draw the necessary 5% of the national vote to qualify
the party for federal matching funds of at least $15 million
in 2004. That's enough money to build a machine that will
eat the Democrats' lunch in four years.." Nader is currently
polling around 5%.
So far as the Democratic Party is concerned, the threatened
Bradley insurgency of last winter proved to be little more
than media puffery. His "left" image was belied
by the fact that a lot of his fundraising came from Republicans
and the big pharmaceutical companies, and that it was hard
to distinguish his views or voting record from either Clinton
or Gore. All three men stand on the conservative end of the
liberal spectrum. in fact, programmatically Bill Clinton is
the most conservative Democratic President of the past hundred
years. Bradley was able to offer a contest only in New Hampshire;
Gore's margins were huge in all the rest.
In actual fact, so damaged is Bush's campaign at the present
time there is a good likelihood that, come Autumn, he will
give up campaigning in California altogether. Bush's strength
in New York State is probably on a par with California, i.e.,
zero. For those familiar with the arcana of US presidential
elections California and New York alone add up to 87 Electoral
College votes, a third of what's necessary to win.
One can only conclude that in the absence of some truly cataclysmic
event (something on the level of a major war or a major assassination
in this country or a stock market collapse a la 1929) Al Gore
will win the presidency, probably by landslide proportions.
If this were to happen Gore would be able to name two or three
people to the Supreme Court, thus breaking the long-standing
conservative stranglehold over the courts. In addition the
Republicans would certainly lose their majority in the House
of Representatives (which they've held since '94, though in
diminishing numbers) and could conceivably even lose the Senate.
At the very least a Gore victory will force a major realignment
inside the Republican Party, necessitating a purge of the
far right and the Christian Coalition if they ever want to
win another election. More likely it would precipitate a split
into its various factions and the demise of the Republicans
as a party, an experience much like what happened to the Whigs
of the Nineteenth Century. McCain's fierce denunciation of
the leadership of the Christian Coalition in the waning days
of the South Carolina primary probably sounded to him as his
opening statement for his own Presidential campaign in 2004,
but it may prove much more fundamental.
As to how and why all this happened: throughout the whole
postwar period until the late 1980s, the Republican Party
was chiefly defined by two planks: it was the party of anticommunism
and militarism. Its occasional earlier reputation for financial
rectitude did not in the main survive its capitulation to
crackpot supply side-ism, a.k.a. Reaganomics.
With the disappearance of the Soviet Union and the communist
bloc, the party was left without a mission or a focus. Despite
the ability on rare occasions to organize itself, as in the
1994 off-year elections (the 'Republican Revolution') when
they won both the House and Senate on a small voter turnout)
they have shown little capacity to lead or formulate a programme,
and the Daddy Bush campaign in 1992 and the Dole campaign
in 1996 were downright pitiful. Though there are several isolated
fragments and agendas at any given moment in the party, the
main fault line is between the old-line establishment economic
conservatives on the one hand and the grassroots social conservatives
on the other. Although they need one another, the former for
legitimacy and the latter for cadres and grassroots, they
increasingly appear to have nothing in common save as a bloc
of convenience.
The current Bush campaign had its origins in the debacle
among the various Republican factions after the disappointing
1998 congressional elections. Under the leadership of Newt
Gingrich House Republicans attempted to exploit the media/Kenneth
Starr circus atmosphere surrounding the exposure of the Bill
Clinton-Monica Lewinsky dalliance in February 1998 into a
big-time victory. Gingrich was quoted as confidently expecting
to add some 40 seats to his majority in the House. They instead
lost 5 seats, which left them with a very thin edge. Whipping
themselves up into a puritanical frenzy they voted Articles
of Impeachment against Clinton, totally without constitutional
justification or any bi-partisan support whatsoever and in
the face of vast and loudly expressed public disapproval.
The Senate trial of course refused to convict the President,
as everyone knew it would, and the Republican witchhunt looked
pointless, mean and out of touch.
This episode of loony-right self-disembowelling frightened
other wings of the Republican establishment who understandably
did not want a rerun of such shenanigans going on during the
presidential elections in 2000. One of these groups was the
more moderate Republican Governors Conference which decided
to do an end run around the nomination process, naming one
of their own in order to preempt fringe candidates like Bauer
or Quayle, popular among Republican core activists but anathema
to the American citizenry.
The Governors Conference selected Bush apparently because
of his name (for name recognition purposes and for his connection
with the old Bush Administration), for his ties to Texas oil
billionaires and for his fund raising ability. So selected
he was supposed to collect a massive financial base and create
a juggernaut effect that would intimidate and overwhelm most
other potential Republican candidates.
Bush has no platform to speak of, only the amorphous mantra
"compassionate conservatism" and a campaigning posture
as the Anti-Clinton; over and over again he has promised to
"bring back honour and decency to the White House",
the latter presumably sullied by Clinton's sexual escapades.
(This purer-than-thou stance proved not a good idea, as rumours
surfaced about Shrub's party-animal past, and purse-lipped
uptight Republicans who had spent the past eight years sniffing
at Bill Clinton as a pot-smoking draft dodger were not much
amused by stories about cocaine toots and a rich-kid privileged
military career guarding the Texas coastline during the war
in Vietnam.)
The best the left can probably hope for in this election
is a Gore victory, a resounding defeat of the right, and an
indication that a movement to the left, perhaps around the
Greens, has begun to coalesce. The labour leadership has shown
many signs recently of wanting to act independently; there
exists a bloc of convenience with Gore where they agree to
disagree over globalization. Bush is too far to the right
and too vociferously anti-labor for the labor movement to
take a "plague on both your houses" attitude in
this election, but if the right is drastically weakened this
time around, the excuse that the Democrats are the lesser
evil won't work anymore in the future. The staples of the
Democratic Party - the environment, abortion rights, the economy,
health care and gun control - are genuinely popular and address
felt needs. The problem for many is that the Democratic Party
doesn't take them seriously. If Nader has a successful impact
in this election period, he will at least be able to hold
Gore's feet to the fire for the next four years.
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