Presidential Election

Yes, in case you missed it, there’s a presidential election going on in the US. It seems to have been going on for about five years. Either that or it has been a particularly nasty one, thus making up for relative brevity – let’s say its only been going on for two years – with a boat load of ignorant and misleading claims. Never has the American public been less well served.

Never mind, it will all be over soon. That way we can concentrate on 2016. After all, if Obama wins he is ineligible for 2016, so we will be treated, from Wednesday onwards, to endless articles about the front runners of both parties for the next bout of electoral insanity. Were Romney to win, which looks unlikely at the moment, then the focus would be only on his Democratic opponent. That, I suppose, would be a small blessing for those of us suffering from electoral overload.

Meanwhile a brief survey of the electoral landscape as it appears the day before.

Obama looks set to win. This is, in many ways, a shocking thought. Americans are notoriously deficient in anything resembling long term political thought. It is hard for most to recall the total mess that Obama’s predecessor made of practically everything. Talk to most and you would think the economy boomed between 2000 and 2008. Or that jobs were abundant. Or that the deficit was under tight control. None of these things is true, but the facts of the Bush era are lost. I think this is a deliberate act of collective forgetfulness. His rein was a horror in so many ways that Americans prefer to pretend he never existed.

For Republicans this means not mentioning his name and simply acting as if the last Republican president was Ronald Reagan. They appear to want to expunge both Bushes so as to be able to forget the mauling they received at the hands of Bill Clinton in the 1990’s. The cost of eliminating Clinton is that Bush Senior is consigned to the same trash heap as his rotten son.

Thus Republicans are prone to wheel out Reagan as the talisman for ideological purity even though his views on most things now appear quaintly centrist. Such is the relentless drift of the Republicans over the past three decades that even their recent patron saint fits only slightly within their current policy positions. Nonetheless we see and hear the Reagan litmus test all the time.

For Democrats the Bush problem is more complex. They cannot invoke his name either because so doing exposes them to bouts of false comparisons. The current recession has its roots in Bush policies. It began in his regime. The early and most of the most controversial responses were organized by his troops – I doubt he had much to do with it personally. Yet the consequences were most felt  within the Obama first term. So the lone between the Bush errors and the Obama responses is easily blurred, leaving any attempt to foist the problem onto Bush’s shoulders as sounding rather lame. Even if it’s true. Plus, since Americans want to forget all things Bush, any time his name is invoked they run away from the conversation in fright. The recent hurricane is a great example of this reflex. It is only within wonky policy circles that anyone is comparing the reaction of government to Hurricanes Katrina and Sandy. Outside those circles only the current crisis matters. 2005 is an aeon ago for regular folks.

So the general public evaluates Obama in a peculiar way. They hold him responsible for the ineffective response to the financial crisis and the subsequent small depression we are living through. Yet they also have echoes of the long slow decline in opportunity that set in well before he took office. Since they dare not name Bush, that echo sounds ethereal and disconnected, but it allows them to give Obama more latitude than their short term memories would normally allow. It’s like waking up from a bad dream. You know it was bad, but you cannot recall its specifics. So you look more kindly upon the world around you for fear the dream might return or, worse, be real.

Nonetheless Obama should have been beaten. The recovery is anemic to say the least. yes, I know that that is normal fate a financial crisis, but the public doesn’t. They the ones voting. So, given that ignorance, Obama ought to have been trounced.

That he is likely winning is a testimony to his opponent and to the toxic message of the Republicans.

And this, I think, is the core message of the election.

The Republicans look and sound like a party having one last desperate roll of the extreme ideological dice. Their policies and personnel are extreme. They represent a radical break with recent American history. Having failed to undo America’s modest welfare state over the decades since FDR initiated it, they have grown ever more focused on that as a policy goal. They blame the government, and any dependence upon it, as the sole reason for America’s relative decline. Where you and I may see poverty and need, they now see laxity and exploitation. Their objective has become to free America’s poor from their debilitating reliance on the government and thus to allow them to become ‘givers’ rather than ‘takers’. One of the most consistent themes running throughout this election is the shock expressed on the right at the number of people whose lives rely on the government in some way. This reliance is seen as crippling initiative and hard work. It rewards, we are told, indolence. Thus the unemployed ought not be protected, but forced to take work at whatever wage is available. No matter that such a policy would wreck families and destroy individual futures, at least the workers in question would be free and morally correct. Thus the sick ought to fend for themselves as best they can. If they have no insurance that is because they have made bad choices and incorrect priorities in their spending. It isn’t because insurance is unaffordable. Then, if all else fails, the poor and sick ought throw themselves into the arms of charity, because charity engenders no dependence, it implies no social contract. Instead it invokes the goodwill of the wealthy and the religious both of whose agendas are unquestioned by the right.

If this all sounds strangely evocative of Europe circa late 1890’s, then I have news for you: America, in its search for an identity in a multi-polar world, and post Bush fiasco, is reliving that era. As the glow of post cold war dominance starts to fade, as various global challenges arise – particularly that to American middle class living standards – and as demographic shifts rewrite the American voting public, right wingers here have been forced to dig out Victorian era social etiquette and norms. Because so much of more recent Republican thought stands indicted as cause not cure for decline the right has delved into history for its inspiration.

This election is the best chance they had of capturing sufficient power to throw the country back to those times, and for undoing the perceived evils of the social response to both depressions and, even more perhaps, to the greater evils of the hated 1960’s: the civil and women’s rights movements. Time after time in this election we have been treated to elderly white male Republicans caught saying outlandishly obsolete, discriminatory, and boorish things about women. One such incident would be an outlier to be ignored. Several such simply confirms the notion of a party massively and desperately out of step with the nation it seeks to rule.

Then there’s the racial undertone. Unfortunately there is a significant portion of America that cannot abide the race of its sitting president. His presence in the White House offends them. So they create oblique ways to justify their hatred that are not overtly racist. This can lead to absurd contradictions such as the common complaint that Obama only made it to prominence because of affirmative action. It was not, we are told, because of talent. He must have cheated. He didn’t work for it. In contras, we are also told, Mitt Romney earned every penny he has and deserves credit for the fortune he has amassed. Romney thus typifies the American dream. Obama denies it. That the exact opposite is true is laid aside. It fails to fit the narrative. A black man cannot personify the American dream because that would undermine the notion that the underclass [read minorities] is permanently on the take. A white man born into wealth and privilege, however, can.

This then defines the election.

It is a contest between a privileged throwback and a flawed self-made modern man. Time is against the fortunes of the former and his party. Their base of support is in decline. Before long those so-called minorities and their respective narratives will dominate elections. The days of elderly white male dominance is fading. Hence the air of desperation to win this time. If Romney loses the game is over. The Republicans will have to re-tool in order to retain relevance. That implies a move back to the center on social issues and an acceptance of some semblance of social contract. It will also imply an end to the denial of the progress made by women and to the shift in social values generally.

I cannot end without a comment on the deep corruption that pervades American elections. The hold of proper democracy here is tenuous. The presidential election is not a national election subject to national rules in the way most outsiders would recognize such a process. It is, in fact, a series of simultaneous state level elections for national officeholders. So the rules of election are local and are subject to intense manipulation. Cheating is common. Fraud not unknown. One special aspect of that fact this time is the enormous effort made in states with Republican local governments to make voting very difficult. These voter suppression programs are often hidden behind reasonable sounding veils. One such being the idea of a voter needing a photographic identification card in order to be eligible to vote.  Those most affected by this rule would be the elderly, the poor – especially minorities – or the young. They are the groups least likely to posses such an ID – a driver’s license for instance. The result has been to elimination of many lifelong voters who, in old age, have no need for a driver’s license. They also happen, disproportionately, to vote Democratic.

A similar suppression effort is the purging from the voting rolls of people who live in multi-occupation home addresses. The have been concerted efforts by right wing organizations to challenge the legitimacy of voting rights for people is such homes. This is wildly discriminatory – the poor and especially minority poor tend to cohabit in extended family homes. Thus many people register to vote at one address. This apparently offends right wing sensibility and they often successfully get such people thrown off the rolls. This puts the voter in the perverse position of having to prove their right to vote. This is both legally and bureaucratically difficult. It acts as a strong voter suppression tool. These folks too tend to be Democrats. Funny that.

Then there’s money. Lots of it. The floodgates were opened by the anti-democratic decision of the Supreme Court known as Citizens United. The upshot, not unforeseen, was that it eliminated most controls over the ability of rich people to spend to buy elections. The consequence is that this election  has seen blatant corruption become endemic. Elections are being bought. Or at least the attempt is being made. Shady organizations have sprung up dedicated to gathering cash and spewing it into close election races in order to tip the balance. The majority of these organizations – but not all – are shells for right wing sympathizers. They can remain anonymous behind the corporate veil of the shell, but their influence can be profound.

Oddly this flood of cash has has less impact than many – myself included – feared. This is for two reasons. First the shell organizations are corrupt themselves and appear more to be opportunities for their organizers to get rich than to influence elections. Second, and more telling perhaps, is that there are a limited number of places for the money to get spent. These shells are not capable or inclined to build on the ground networks of election day workers, so they limit themselves to spending money on advertising. This, in turn, limits them to spending in the few truly decisive states where the election outcome could be swayed by such advertising. Given the number of outlets for advertising in such places this also limits the impact of the cash – there are only so many airtime minutes available to be bought. The result is the strange sight of big money being spent where it has little chance of having any impact. For instance in states where the outcome is beyond doubt. I suspect this is because of the first reason: the shell organizers want to justify the huge management fees they earn. So they spend the money regardless of impact. After all to hand it back to those anonymous donors would smack of defeat. This view is supported by the observation that more often than not the shell organizations spend their cash on work done by research and media firms owned by the very managers of the shells themselves. They are paying themselves handily for doing ineffective work.

So the impact of Citizens United has been blunted by corruption. As if two wrongs do make a right.

That’s my hope anyway.

Let’s wait and see.