We asked a number of First contributors to comment on the 2004 election. Our respondents came back to us at different moments during the campaign so we have dated their responses.
No Half-Stepping
By Lawrence Goodwyn
This is the most important election in the country since 1936 and poses the same question: what kind of America will emerge from the economic and cultural wars of the immediate on-coming generations. In the very short-run, the government’s “faith based initiative” offers the prospect of federal money to help churches fund local humanitarian programs, a hand in hand effort reciprocated by energetic get-out-the-vote campaigns staffed by the rank and file of cooperating churches. Emerging in the same fortnight is a local (and perhaps even statewide) vote suppression initiative such as the one this week that generated a march on the Republican Supervisor in Madison, Wisconsin. This gentleman responded to the sharp increase in voter registration in inner city wards by declining citizen requests to increase the number of printed ballots.
The premature unveiling of this kind of limp civic consciousness on the part of the Bushites is actually fairly small potatoes compared to the vast electronic opportunities for fraudulent vote counting opening up as a result of the appearance of thousands of new “touch” voting machines across the land-housed as many of them are in unreliable political structures such as, to name one, Jeb Bush’s Florida.
In what might aptly be called “experientially grounded expertise,” Ronnie Dugger, founder and continuing spirit behind the liberal Texas Observer, has been going around the country in an effort to sensitize competent computer specialists, non-complacent lawyers, and relevant others as to the dangers of November vote frauds by people who are self-consciously determined to “change the culture” of America. The well-timed corporate giveaway in Congress in mid-October is merely a small piece of cement in the evangelical-corporate-frontiersman ethos that has become the “mainstream” of the neo-conservative party. Those who think Tom DeLay has “overstepped” himself lately do not understand the stakes here: Oversteppiing is the game.
The Republican negotiators charged with setting the ground rules for the presidential debates made a serious mistake when they endeavored to protect themselves and the President against having too lengthy a period of time allocated for extemporaneous replies. When they settled for one-and-a-half minutes, they were unwittingly forcing their cautious, thoughtful and polysyllabic Democratic opponent to be clear in the name of being concise. The shift in cadence transformed Kerry as a national campaigner. The clear-cut Kerry victory wiped out Bush’s lead and appears to have brought the presidency within reach. The challenge now is to protect the victory. This absolutely includes making systematic plans to have in place a massive popular response in the event of “overstepping.” After all, the neo-conservatives are right: what is at stake is the political culture of the country.
October 14, 2004
Word Up
By Casey Hayden
I heard somewhere recently the dictionary definition of fascism has been altered. It now focuses narrowly on abridgements of civil liberties and other oppressive actions by a government. Before, the definition invoked regimes where government and corporate power collaborated to command a country’s economy. The loss of clarity here this abrasion of our language makes it more difficult to describe the actual conditions the Republican Party’s far right has generated.
The Dean campaign’s capacity to generate new sources of funding for the Democratic Party was hopeful. It’s a prerequisite for the emergence of a new politics capable of confronting the current situation. As long as the Democrats get their money from the same sources as the Republicans… However, I’ll be voting for John Kerry.
September 29, 2004
It Can Happen Here
By Greil Marcus
With all the latest polls showing Bush solidifying his position in state after state, either taking Pennsylvania and Florida from Kerry by small margins or increasing leads in Wisconsin, Ohio, Missouri, and Virginia – all state supposedly up for grabs a week ago – I don’t think I have any thoughts that far from what others, from Joe Klein to Joe Conason, are saying. I can offer this passage from Sinclair Lewis’s 1935 “It Can’t Happen Here” about the election of Senator Buzz Windrip, running on a platform of fascist dictatorship, as president in 1936. With the Depression still ruling the country, he ran as a Democrat, having taken the nomination from FDR, who denounced Windrip as a fraud and formed the Jeffersonian Party; the Republicans nominated the liberal Senator Walter Trowbridge:
The conspicuous fault of the Jeffersonian Party, like the personal fault of Senator Trowbridge, was that it represented integrity and reason, in a year when the electorate hungered for frisky emotions, for the peppery sensations associated, usually, not with monetary systems and taxations rates but with baptism by immersion in the creek, young love under the elms, straight whisky, angelic orchestras heard soaring down from the full moon, fear of death when an automobile teeters above a canyon, thirst in a desert and quenching it with spring water.
September 15, 2004
What’s Love Got to Do With It?
By Mike Rose
There was a remarkable moment in former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani’s speech at the Republican National Convention, a moment I keep turning over and over in my mind. It had to do with love. About half-way through the speech – after praising George Bush’s leadership in responding to 9/11 and before an affirmation of the Bush foreign policy doctrine – Giuliani offers the following scene.
Bush is visiting ground zero and is soon surrounded by “big, real big” construction workers. Their “arms are bigger than [Giuliani’s] legs, and their opinions are even bigger than their arms.” Using language that Giuliani “can’t repeat”, one of the men begins speaking with deep feeling about the attackers to Mr. Bush, and then “embraced the president and began hugging him enthusiastically.” Giuliani completes the moment by observing this was an act of love.
I don’t know this worker, so I can only imagine what feelings must have been churning inside him, seeking some kind of meaningful expression. And suddenly here before him stands the president of the United States. At ground zero. Overwhelming.
What troubles me, though, what I can’t shake, is the use of that moment by Giuliani – and similar moments by other Republican strategists and speechwriters – to certify George Bush’s deep bond with working people. Giuliani describes the construction worker with genial humor, but if you think about it, the portrait is pretty stereotypical: the big, patriotic hard hat. Joe Sixpack. The working men and women I grew up with were strong, yes, and loyal to country, but they were much more. Smart and skeptical, for starters.
Think, for a moment, of all that you won’t see in these GOP portraits. You won’t see the female cannery worker with injured hands or the guys at bitter loose ends when the factory closes. You won’t see people, exhausted, shuttling between two (or more) jobs to make a living or the anxious scramble for minimal health care for their kids. And you sure won’t see people organizing to improve their working lives.
What a funny kind of love it is that undercuts unions, erodes workplace health and safety regulations, opposes increases in the minimum wage, changes overtime rules. The invocation of love at ground zero – and the replaying of the image – mystifies things terribly. Emotion trumps fact: the awful Republican record on working America. God forbid that the fellow embracing Bush develops, as so many have, serious respiratory disease. He won’t find the administration’s policies hospitable to his plight. He’d better seek instead the much-maligned trial lawyer.
American workers don’t need love from their government, especially this funky seduction. They need opportunity. They need an understanding of their struggles. They need an appreciation of the skill and intelligence they bring to their work. They need enough respect for that intelligence that they’re provided with facts rather than emotion. They need the protections of the secure workplace, of the fair wage, of the union contract. They don’t need a one-way romance, the administration taking the embrace, but returning a deadly kiss.
October 4, 2004
[Mike Rose is author of The Mind at Work: Valuing the Intelligence of the American Worker (Viking, 2004) www.mikerosebooks.com.]
Don’t Mourn…
By Steve Sleigh
Which side are you on? The election of 2004 provides workers with a stark choice. George W. Bush and the extreme right Republican record on issues of concern to working people speaks for itself.
Bush’s lopsided tax cuts gifted millionaires with an average tax break of $136,398 while middle-income earners made do with an average of $652 (which often failed to cover increases in state and city taxes). Bush cut overtime pay for 6 million workers; looked away as health care costs doubled in four year (and 45 million Americans struggled to get by without health insurance), proposed giving $60 billion to companies that lay off American workers while outsourcing work overseas, and urged Americans to dream on about our (“feeling stronger everyday”) economy as nearly 2 million manufacturing jobs were eliminated over the past four years. Democrats (and even some Republicans) have drawn attention to many of Bush’s failings on the economic front. But his assault on workers’ organizations has been less visible though it’s deeply dispiriting to people who depend on wages or salaries for their income. In early 2001 workers at United Airlines exercised their right to strike after more than two years of unsuccessful attempts to reach agreement through negotiations. The Bush administration, at the request of United, intervened on the side of the Company to keep workers from using their weapon of last resort: not working!
Later that same year the Longshoreman’s union on the West Coast struck the ports of California, Oregon, and Washington. The longshoreman’s strike paralyzed shipments to and from Asia, putting a serious crimp in the global economy. The Bush administration couldn’t stand for that and declared a national emergency, forcing the workers back to work and seriously compromising their bargaining power.
Throughout the past four years organized labor has been unwelcome at the White House and, for the most part, at the Department of Labor. In fact, the Department of Labor issued new, punitive measures that require all unions to provide public reporting on their operations that would send corporate America into cardiac arrest. Republican appointees in the Department of Labor seem to be laboring under the illusion that those corporate scandals that robbed American workers and shareholders alike at Enron, World Com, Tyco, and on and on, were caused by unions! Recent polling and experience indicate that Kerry will receive around 65% of the vote from union members and their immediate family members. The union influence extends to about 25% of the electorate. The real problem for Kerry and the Democrats is their inability to articulate a coherent economic program that addresses the concerns of American workers. The party that brought workers NAFTA and the WTO (the Democrats) needs to shift gears and get back on the side of working people. When they do that, we will have something to celebrate!
September 29, 2004
[Steve Sleigh is Director of Strategic Resources for the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers.]
No Lunatic
By Ellen Willis
As I write this, in the wake of the first Bush-Kerry debate, the Cheney-Edwards debate, and polls showing that the race has tightened again, my predictive powers fail me. I have no idea ‹ or rather I can make an equally plausible argument either way ‹ if on November 2 American voters will give the present rogue regime a license to run amok for four more years or choose to return, temporarily at least, to neoliberal business as usual. Nor do I know if the election results will be decisive enough to satisfy some basic notion of legitimate government, or whether various kinds of fraud and bullying compounded by unrecountable votes on electronic machines will throw the political system into chaos. But whatever the outcome, one thing is clear: inside or outside the Democratic Party, there is no effective opposition to the Republican right; and therefore the country’s rightward march will continue ‹ either with a recklessness that will further destabilize the U.S. economy and move the world in the direction of apocalyptic catastrophe, or at a slower, more responsible pace. My personal campaign slogan, “John Kerry: Not a Lunatic,” about sums it up.
The Democrats are a party in chronic crisis, a condition that will be easier to deny if Kerry is elected but will not go away. Their dilemma, which dates back at least to the Carter administration and has gotten steadily more untenable in the intervening years, begins with the determination of the Democratic leadership to distance itself from the legacy of the New Deal and the cultural revolt of the `60s and fashion a party of the neoliberal center-right‹a party that will, in essence, further the agenda of corporate globalization. The “new Democrats” support unregulated markets, unrestricted trade, privatization, the shrinking of public goods and entitlements, and lowering taxes on corporations and the wealthy, but they are also cautious and “realistic” in both domestic and foreign affairs. As they see it, moves toward a free market economy must be accompanied by palliatives to reduce the economic dislocation (and potential political turmoil) they cause; deficit spending is irresponsible; making the global economy safe for investment demands international cooperation, choosing one’s battles carefully, and promoting stability above all.
The problem with this program, from the standpoint of winning elections, is that while it reflects the interests of powerful elites, it expresses no moral or social vision that might engage the public’s imagination and therefore has no mass constituency whatsoever. Indeed, the neoliberals, with their top-down philosophy, are deeply uncomfortable with mass mobilization of any sort. Yet the party still depends on the votes of liberals and “progressives” as well as the money and activism of labor unions and liberal organizations, which it must manage to hang onto despite its repeated and predictable betrayals. In a further irony, by collaborating with Republican conservatives in isolating the left, the neolibs have succeeded in shrinking their own electoral base.
So far the party leadership ‹ with considerable help from the ultra-right in general and George W. Bush in particular ‹ has done an excellent job of keeping its left flank in line by mixing bits of vaguely populist rhetoric with the argument that its brand of “moderation” is the only practical alternative to the right-wing bogeyman. But to win in the circumstances they themselves have helped create, Democrats also have to change the minds of people who vote Republican or lure to the polls people who don’t normally vote at all, and neoliberalism has little intrinsic appeal for either group.
In 1988 Dukakis lost less because he was a “Massachusetts liberal” than because he presented himself as a technocrat who thought the election was about “competence, not ideology”: competence was no match for Willie Horton. In 1992, the party cobbled together a victory from a chancy confluence of factors‹a particularly charming candidate (whose informal “unpresidential” demeanor and lack of foreign affairs or military credentials were not the disqualifiers they would be now), an incumbent who seemed passionless and disengaged, a religious right that came across as punitive and scary at the Republican convention, a third-party candidate who cut into the Republican vote, and a lousy economy, stupid. In 2000 Gore’s anemic neoliberal campaign resulted in an election so close as to come down to the disputed Florida vote; then, in rejecting the militance of his black and labor-union supporters and making his first priority the stability of the system, he ensured his ultimate loss. In 2004, if Kerry wins it will be because the right has badly overreached and Iraq is a bloody mess ‹ not because he has promised to cut corporate taxes. This is not a politics capable of threatening Republican dominance in any serious way.
The Democratic establishment sells itself to liberals by professing to be pragmatic, but on its central concerns it could hardly be more ideological. In a campaign where the Democrats’ greatest liability is the perception that Bush stands for something and Kerry does not, can there be any doubt that Kerry would stir up excitement and gain crucial votes by moving left? Suppose he announced that since national security begins at home, he would propose a federal public works cum civil defense program that would simultaneously shore up our crumbling infrastructure, help protect our borders, ports, and nuclear facilities, and create jobs? Or that, in the name of national solidarity and equality of sacrifice, it’s time to face the crisis in our health care system and institute national health insurance, paid for by a steep rise in the maximum income tax rate? Not a chance: after years of uniting with the Republicans to dismiss such welfare-state measures as looney-tunes and beyond the bounds of responsible debate, the new Democrats would rather lose than allow them back into the conversation. Nor do they want to win an election by arousing the hopes and expectations of workers, black people and other such grass-roots constituencies, for this would mean an end to neoliberal control of the party.
Within these unacknowledged strictures, the neolibs’ only strategy is to peel off “swing voters” from the Republicans. But in trying to project themselves as moderate, they come across as bland. Their proposed economic remedies, which mainly seem to consist of throwing tax credits at problems, cannot compete with Republicans’ appeals to people’s hopes of getting rich in an “opportunity” or “ownership” society; nor does realist foreign policy have the ring of exhortations to crush the terrorists and make the world safe for democracy. Lacking a compelling theme to put in perspective the shifts and compromises that are the very definition of professional politics, neoliberal candidates are vulnerable to the charge of “flip-flopping.” (As Jonathan Chait reminds us in The New Republic, this line of attack on Kerry is not new: Gore and Clinton before him were also accused of waffling.)
On social and cultural issues, regardless of how often they repeat patriotic, pro-family, faith-based platitudes, Democratic candidates have great difficulty convincing voters that they have “mainstream values.” This is in part because the neoliberal program, like global capital itself, is grounded in secular cosmopolitanism, and in part because the Democrats’ indispensable feminist and gay constituencies, though willing to swallow a lot of pandering to swing voters’ presumed social conservatism, do have certain bottom lines‹like support for legal abortion and opposition to a constitutional amendment banning gay marriage. But it’s mostly because neoliberalism is a politics of class interest, not moral conviction. While there’s some crossover between “pure” neolibs and communitarians or evangelical Christians who are genuine social conservatives, the real payoff, from a neoliberal standpoint, of “values” like “hard work” and “playing by the rules” is disciplining the workforce to accept longer hours, lower pay, and fewer social benefits. Democratic value-speak is widely perceived as phony and opportunistic because, for the most part, it is. Witness party insiders’ agonizing over Kerry’s lack of religiosity (surely his most appealing trait), apparently seeing no contradiction in the idea that he can convince Americans he has deeply-held beliefs by pretending to be someone he is not.
The flip side of the Democrats’ crisis is, of course, the quiescence of its rank and file of labor, liberal and social democratic activists and fellow travelers. Having bought the myth of the public’s intractable conservatism, and internalized the propaganda of the Republicans and the Democratic centrists that liberals are not “real Americans” but some sort of mutant `60s-urban-coastal life form, they feel illegitimate and cannot imagine themselves governing. Terrified of bringing on the Holocaust by asserting themselves in any way, they demand nothing from Democratic candidates in return for their support and tolerate no breaking of ranks, a mindset that has reached its apotheosis in the present orgy of “Anybody But Bush” self-abnegation.
Instead of blaming Gore and the Democrats for the myriad ways they blew the 2000 election, or the Republicans for shameless thuggery on the part of everyone from Katherine Harris to the “bourgeois rioters” who shut down the Miami-Dade recount to the Bush v. Gore 5, liberals have displaced their frustration and rage onto an obsession with Ralph Nader. In the past four years, hysteria over Nader the anti-Christ has taken on all the symptoms of moral panic; this year ridiculous amounts of time and money have been spent fighting to knock him off the ballot even in states that are not contested. Here we leave the realm of rational politics for that of psychoanalysis. Granted that Nader too has gone off the deep end, collaborating with Republicans and the Reform Party at the expense of his credibility and to no apparent end but to punish his Democratic tormentors. It is nonetheless true that Nader fixation is a grand diversion from the painful task of facing up to the bankruptcy of the Democrats. For if Kerry and his crowd were willing to give an inch to the left, Nader would be easily neutralized.
The paralysis of liberal Democrats can’t be disentangled from the absence of a radical left in any way comparable to the organized radical right either in numbers or ideological impact. Why the left has, by and large, failed to come to terms with the failure of socialism and develop convincing new models of social transformation is a subject for another essay. The result, however, is a vacuum of ideas and an inability to translate left positions on this or that issue into a larger vision, which might excite a mass movement powerful enough to put pressure on the Democrats and either change the party from within or supplant it with a new party of insurgents. Deprived of such an infusion of ideas, liberals can fulfill their political function‹watering down and making respectable the demands of radicals‹only by continuing to draw down the political and cultural capital of the `30s and `60s, to less and less effect. Meanwhile, the radicals of the right have managed to parlay the main assumptions of their economic and to a lesser extent their social agenda into bipartisan common sense.
True, with their relentless aggressiveness the radicals periodically push too far, and the public slaps them down. But unlike liberals who cave at the first hint of opposition, the right views lost political battles and lost elections as temporary glitches, picks itself up off the floor and goes on pushing. If Kerry wins in November, he will have no mandate to do anything but be not-Bush ‹ that is, give the electorate a breather from the right-wing revolution. And if past experience is any guide, the right, after a short period of recriminations and disarray, will do everything in its power to undermine and delegitimize the Kerry administration. Kerry and the Democrats will be under constant pressure from the right, and little or none from the left. The depressing consequences are far easier to predict than the outcome of the election itself.
October 15, 2004
All Politics Becomes Foreign
By Sheldon Wolin
For many liberals the all-consuming passion of the 2004 election is to defeat George Bush. I, too, shared the passion and signed a public statement in support of Kerry. As the campaign unfolded I became steadily more dubious, not so much of the two candidates as of the election itself and the party system. One question that nagged was what have elections become such that, beginning with Reagan, they generate more demagogic sloganeering, less light, and bigger campaign funds to solicit support from an electorate, almost half of which will probably not vote? Does a politics, at once vicious and simplistic, suit a turned-off, uninformed electorate? And what kind of political system surely not a democracy would thrive on a politics of apathy and its correlate of relentlessly mind-numbing attack ads?
A second question was, are we experiencing in our politics and parties the combined efforts of a globalizing economy and an imperial politics? And are these new scales reflected in our party system? Under a two-party system, in which the majority party undertakes to govern while the other serves as an opposition, offering criticism and proposing alternatives, there is always the chance that party politics will cause some moments of instability. However, imperial politics and globalizing capital are allergic to instability and so we are given a one-and-a-half party system. Only one party, the Republican, appears equally capable of governing when elected and opposing when out of power – and both with a vengeance. In both roles it performs a stabilizing function. The Democrats resemble the remains of a party, desperately seeking the center, consistently half-hearted whether opposing or governing a party so unsure of its identity that it could not muster sufficient resolve to disown the reactionary Zell Miller. No pun intended, but John Kerry truly is representative of the party’s center of gravity. After co-opting Dean’s anti-war following to win the Kansas delegation, he hastened to reassure the Democratic Leadership Council, the center of the center, that no one was a more fervent defender of corporate capitalism than he.
As Kerry’s campaign wandered aimlessly prior to and after the Democratic convention, liberal pundits (Dowd, Krugman, et. al.) struggled valiantly, even hermeneutically, to identify and interpret the “real” meaning of Kerry’s pronouncements. That was, however, to miss the point. The problem was not Kerry’s meandering rhetoric, or uncertain resolve. Rather it has to do with the consolidation of a system of politics in which players amd parties are so deeply dependent on corporate sponsors for election, on their lobbyists and think tanks for policy formulations, on the media (a Fourth Estate that resembles an estate under the ancien regime) that party differences seem to shrink. This is not because Republicans have expediently adopted liberal policies. Rather the reverse. As the globalizing and imperial party, as well as the dominant party, Republicans have set the terms of competition by defining themselves as anti-liberal. Democrats followed suit by reducing differences to a matter of nuance.
Just how the politics of stabilization works was displayed in the venomous attacks on Nader by liberal pundits and Democratic leaders following the Florida debacle in 2000. Historically, third parties have served to raise issues which the traditional parties are reluctant to address but which they sometimes adopt, if only out of expediency. The claim that Nader “lost” the election for the Democrats rests on an astonishing assumption; that a third party candidate, who had sharply contrasted his views with those of the Democratic candidate, was somehow obligated to abandon his principles, withdrawing in favor of a candidate with whom he profoundly disagreed. Without exacting any reciprocity, Nader and his supporters were supposed to betray their convictions and abandon their challenge to corporate domination of politics. Further, it meant that for all practical purposes, the only justifiable third parties are those with views so cranky that their supporters could not in any way affect an election. The best response to the Nader challenge would have been for the Democratic candidate to entice Nader supporters by adopting some of his signature issues. That would have meant taking on corporate power, historically a major concern of the party but now viewed as the equivalent of a third rail.
The issue comes down to one of bad faith: granted that Kerry would probably wind down the Iraq operations sooner than Bush whether in fact, he could is debatable we’re left with a domestic program which is marginally superior; not because of its inventiveness, much less of any promises of sweeping social or environmental reforms, but because of its contrast with the wildly reactionary policies pursued by the Bush administration. The problem with the modest promise of Kerry’s program is that it underestimates the nature of the threat posed by the present administration. It involves nothing less than the transformation of American politics, beyond the evisceration of liberalism’s civil liberties and social welfare programs, to the eradication of the remaining vestiges of a democratic politics.
The character of that transformation is prefigured in the changed character of the Republican party from deficit hawks, isolationists, opponents of the intrusive government to big spenders, interventionists, champions of judicial extremists who, perhaps, want to return to the original Constitution because that document had no Bill of rights.
Republicans offer the best clues about the new shape of politics and about the transformation of modern democracy. Socially it takes the form of widening class disparities in income, education, access to health care and retirement arrangements. Social inequality acquires the status of social given as well as a political assumption and carries with it widening disparities of power. Culturally it plays off the tensions between a growing religiosity, repressive and self-righteous, against a juvenile hedonism that exhausts itself in the chase after novelty. The “political” is displaced by a political economy compounded of an amalgamation of state and corporate powers, of political empire with global markets. The imperial dimension serves to attenuate citizen-politics. Imperial politics is confided to nation-sates and corporations. Domestic politics and policies become increasingly subservient to international politics and policies: politics becomes, remote, “foreign” to the citizen.
Until politicians and parties show how we can retrieve, let alone revitalize, political and social democracy; or whether we can reconcile the inner contradictions of an imperial democracy or a constitutional superpower, the election of 2004 will at best, provide some breathing space for tackling these deeper issues; or, at worst, continue to exhaust the nation’s economic resources as it has its political inheritance.
October 8, 2004
[An augmented edition of Sheldon Wolin’s Politics and Vision has just been published by Princeton University Press.]
Odds On? Odds Off?
By Sidney Offit
I was baptized as a skeptic of presidential polls during the 1948 campaign. An an editor of the Johns Hopkins students’ weekly, I wrote editorials in supporting Henry A. Wallace, the Progressive Party candidate whom I’d met, and his running mate Glen. H. Taylor, with whom I’d hummed along as he strummed his banjo and sang to the tune of “Home on the Range”: “Oh give me a home/Near the Capitol Dome…”
With a few exceptions all the members of the campus paper staff along with every English, political science, history and philosophy student I knew supported the Third Party ticket. But George Gallup was galloping over the country predicting Thomas E. Dewey as the odds-on favorite. With the counsel of Professor V.O. Key, an authority on political parties and pressure groups, and Dr. Charles Hammond, a statistics professor, we conducted our own campus poll. Following our experts’ directions, we checked out students majoring in business, engineering, biology, physics and political economics, as well as our hometeam Progressives.
The results were surprisingly! outrageous! impossible! Approximately 54% of the students we polled favored the Republican Thomas Dewey, 38% were for the Democrat Truman, and only 8% preferred our man Wallace.
I haven’t felt more disturbed by polls until this year. But then I recall my Dad’s response when I shared the 1948 poll results with him. He was sitting in his rocker on the porch of our Baltimore apartment, puffing a Herbert Tareyton, and contemplating his day’s action as the most respected bookmaker in Maryland. When I expressed my disappointment, and confessed my fear that Gallup and our campus polls might be right, my Dad, the Sage of me life, said quietly, “My money is on Harry Truman.” He paused and then continued as if prodded by my need to know more. “Comes down to the wire, dis country will go with party of the underdog, the working stiff, the champion of the little guy. Dem polls, they’re like the morning line, handicappers. They got nothin’ to say to you if you got an opinion of yer own.”
On the eve of this election more than a half a century later, with the polls predicting a Bush victory, I remember my Dad’s words and am comforted and confident of my own opinion: Odds on favorites Kerry and Edwards! “all the way to the White House “…Near the Capitol Dome…”
September 23, 2004
Green Thumb in Your Eye
By Lorna Salzman
John Kerry is going to lose to George Bush, and frankly I will be very sorry, but not because I like John Kerry. I was hoping that Kerry would win so we could have four crumby years under his administration, at the end of which time we greens could turn to the “progressive” community and its paleoliberal pals and say: See, we told you how bad things would be if the Democrats won.
Why will Kerry lose? Lots of reasons: he is a lousy candidate, he can’t attract independent voters because he doesn’t offer a meaningful alternative to Bush, he cant attract disgruntled Republicans or centrists because they want The Real Thing, not Bush Lite, and perhaps most significantly he isn’t really running to win.
In fact it is likely that the Democrats really don’t care if they lose the election. The fat cats in the DP wont starve, lose their legal fees or alienate their corporate friends. They will still be riding the gravy train. Most important of all, if the Democrats actually won the election, they, not the Republicans, would be in the hot seat on the Iraq war and would spend their days worrying how to continue the war while saying they wanted to pull out our troops.
It will be a lot more comfortable for them if they let Bush and the Republicans take the flak for the war, which worsens day by day, while they sit back and cluck “tsk tsk tsk, aren’t you sorry you voted for Bush?”.
Since the Republican agenda on virtually all issues – health care, corporate subsidies, globalization, WTO, energy policy – is the same as the Democrats’ agenda, the Democrats can sit back for another four years, just as they have done since 2000, letting the Republican steamroller flatten them in congress like dead possums in the road. That is bad enough, but it will be compounded by the paleoliberals who will berate the greens ad nauseum for not supporting Kerry and will once again blame Nader for their loss. They haven’t figured out that they don’t need Nader to lose an election. They are quite capable of losing on their own.
September 17, 2004
Beat Bush’it
By Amiri Baraka
A critical lack of understanding of the US nation, by too many of those who feature themselves “Knowledgeable” hip, blase, &c is that they think the world is a fixed entity that actually only responds to their over the top idealism as appetite.
For instance, even people close to me have said, “How can you tell people to vote for Kerry, there’s no real difference!”
To say – as the Nadir of Liberalism mumbles that Democrats and Republicans are the same – is common weed type Liberalism (See Lenin, “How Democracy and Liberalism separated,” BUSH IS IN POWER. HE IS THE COMMANDER IN neo -Fascist mufti CHIEF. Bush and the Cheney’s, Rummy’s, Colons, Condoskeezas, Wolf -o Half Wits, &c are IN CHARGE. They could, by the time this appears, ignite, aid or initiate a couple of even more fatal 911’s. (See Moore’s flick ASAP)
If we can understand finally that the overall struggle is for A PEOPLES DEMOCRACY, that is the main struggle, the abiding life or death ground combat we should find ourselves in. BEAT BUSH is the KEY LINK in that because if we don’t stop the death ship of Bush’it, Obsession with World Conquest, the anti China deep cover war head these ass hole of Evil are aiming at, and with that, imagine, overweight, comfort corrupt worm head Americans might try, we are looking for real, at the potential destruction of any thing passing as civilization for the endless conflicts of Orwell’s “1984”. For these racist imbeciles to imagine they can conquer China, with its 1 Billions folk is Texas Roulette!
We cannot reduce our intelligence to the Liberal longing of the Nader’s who simply want to share power with the Imperialists, not overthrow them (Read his telephone dialogue, e.g..) This is the weasely absorption into swamplib, the more reactionary sector of the petty bourgeois radicals of the 60’s, the flower children, the radicals who now sell us interesting teas, and organic diversion. Or retrograde politics disguised as Democracy and Independence. This is outright vomity fraud.
Nader will get Bush elected if he has way, (he is about a minute I feel, from outright accepting the petty bourgeois whore job… Can anyone doubt it after the revelations of his funding from big Republicans, his forthcoming book published by, Thass right, Rupert Murdoch
WE MUST STOP BUSH TO DEEPEN AND STRENGTHEN THE FIGHT BACK AGAINST OBVIOUSLY EXPRESS TRAIN FASCISM. (“Post pone the election”??, a New Jersey Negro, Buster Soaries, a DISMORAL paradigm, he belonged to The Congress of African People for about thirty seconds, then claimed he got kidnapped by anonymous gangsters.) (True)! The whole campaign that must be launched to reform the US political system, as a beginning, will not move under the Bush hammer. No matter the foolish Social Democrats who think fascism will bring us Revolution. (Like the violently deceased Social Democrats in Weimar, Germany, as well as, sadly, the Liebnecht-Luxembourg Spartacist Left-Communists.)
We have no party, we have no mobilization, and we have no movement, except objectively intense opposition to the BushReich is burgeoning swiftly. We must have time and a break in the steadily right moving US political trend, as led by the Superpower neo fascist Bush coven.
It is this Beat Bush initiative that is the only shortstop of the neo-Nazi Bush Right and their Corporate, Religious, Opportunist liberal Gestalt. The Political Reforms, one person one vote, elimination of the Billionaire Club US Senate, Prohibition of private monies in the elections, standard methods and times of voting and the Direct Democracy and elimination of the Electoral College and Winner Take All Sham cannot be eliminated under the Bush Juggernaut.
We are not saying “VOTE FOR KERRY”…WE ARE SAYING “BEAT BUSH!” AND THAT IS THE ONLY WAY to Political Reforms, (and yes, the struggle for Afro-American Reparations, as a struggle for a Peoples Democracy is part of that)! End of Super Power profit making Wars, and the critical Cultural Revolution to reorganize a Revolutionary Democratic & cultural movement and shut down the corporate reactionary domination by the most backward sectors of the bourgeois over the Communications and Culture of the US, and the entire superstructure, which makes for domination of the political culture and economic development.,
Either the US people BEAT BUSH, or the Ghosts of Weimar, an American Weimar will surely rise to Beat US!
September 21, 2004
Out of Time
By Wesley Hogan and Dirk Philipsen
The stark election moonscape appears forlorn to most everyone. From out here in Left-Field, the scene seems particularly barren. There stands Kerry, a centrist-right candidate wedded to corporate money. Only a vote for him can prevent a stampede by the “R” party the Rich, the Religious Right, and the cultural Reactionaries. Progressives like Robin Kelley and Eric Mann persevere, urging us to go one step further than the Anybody-But-Bushies and serve our civic duty by organizing the left as pressure on Kerry. Regardless of the courses we choose, most independent progressives seem to be searching for an escape hatch from the poverty of what passes as American political discourse. None of the important topics are on the table of the Republicrats.
First, we need to talk about money and how it’s distributed. How are we to achieve some level of economic equity, when seventy-four percent of Americans are working longer hours for less money than in the 1980s, not to mention that by now less than 500 of the richest people in the world‹many of them Americans‹own more wealth than over one half of the entire global population combined? Second, Kyoto-Schmeeoto. We need to put our current course of environmental suicide on the political table. While it would be prudent to plan for the seventh generation, at this point even planning for our grandchildren’s energy, food, water, and air supply would be radical. Third, the U.S. government squandered the entire surplus of international sympathy post-9/11. Instead the W. government speedily crushed new opportunities for a more stable and just international system by invading Iraq, alongside a small Coalition of the Bribed and Coerced. Killing tens of thousands of civilians in an unprovoked war, fought outside of international protocol against a country that caused no danger to us marks it as indefensible. Our history of aiding and abetting dictators, including Saddam Hussein, short-circuits the oft-cited “getting-rid-of a brutal dictator” justification. Either we are the guardians of humanity, or we pursue a policy of national self-interest‹we can’t have it both ways.
Fourth, real women’s issues are not present anywhere. Not anywhere. In neither major party is anyone talking about women and work: availability of decent jobs, family choices that empower, healthcare and childcare that is feasible, pay equity, or the ongoing struggle against sexual harassment and assault. Fifth, neither Kerry nor Bush speak to quality of life issues for the eighty-five percent of the population who lack access to one or all of the following essentials: healthcare, good schools, college, job security, retirement, healthy & affordable childcare, physical safety, green space, and a quality family/community life. Sixth, where is the plan to address the fact that we have burned up and wasted two generations of African American kids through “sharecropper education,” hyper-segregated urban neighborhoods, and the prison system? No one is talking about it but progressives like bell hooks and Barbara Lee, shouting out from the far corners of marginality. If that gaping hole in the national discourse is not appalling, what is?
Finally, somebody needs to put it out there as a Major Political Issue: we have no Reflection Time. How can we figure out what is important and what is not when most of us are exhausted and frantic during our waking hours? Americans now work about 390 hours on average more per year than Western Europeans. And then we commute, drive kids to soccer, fill out forms, chase after health insurance claims or languish in the ER if we don’t have insurance…. and on and on. The “R” Party rhetoric pulls in some of us who are anxious: they argue for “Less Government,” yet burden future generations with endless national debt and coercive social policies that plunge into the furthest recesses of our vaginas and psyches. They are “pro-education,” yet subsidize people sending their kids to private schools. They “lower taxes” by promoting policies that benefit only the top 26% of income-earners. They “Fight Terrorism,” yet pursue a foreign policy that alienates just about everyone outside our borders (thus producing unprecedented hostility and swelling the ranks of terrorists each week).
These slogans only succeed to the extent that we continue in a fog of franticness. Desperate for a clear indicator of personal success, we measure our achievement by what brand of car we drive or what kind of mustard or mayonnaise we use. This intellectual and spiritual impoverishment leaves us drained and empty, and many end up in front of their flat screen tv happy to watch 249 channels of drivel all the way into the Neverland of sleep. We consume it all so well. Yet the central question for Election 2004 is wholly ignored in Bush v. Kerry: What kind of society are we producing?
September 29, 2004
Common Cruelty
By Kate Millett
Despite his little grin, his carefully built common man’s appeal, there is something genuinely evil about George Bush. Consider how he treats his prisoners of war. The pictures from Abu Ghraib prison. It is significant that they have become their photographs, visual reproductions of what they once were, human beings caricatured by outlandish poses into a series of protruding arms and legs from a central core of buttocks. Or lying along the ground like a dog. Or squatting on a stool with electrodes attached to what were its arms, a hood over what was its face.
Bush and Rumsfeld have found ways to make everyone talk to keep you naked and in the dark, for days at a time. To make the night hideous with screams. To do this to time, to pain, to consciousness and to do it not only in Abu Ghraib but in countless unnamed and unlocated prisons throughout the region. Even to confining thousands of undocumented prisoners held in Guantanamo Bay for three years now in a living hell without any recourse to justice or law. These are not a few tormented by a handful. This is a deliberate policy arrived at wholesale.
This is not just an angry man debating on television, furious at being challenged by a far more sophisticated debater. Why has Kerry never mentioned Abu Ghraib prison? George Bush is not merely stubborn as a male driver miles from his destination clinging to the wheel with a heavy foot on the gas pedal this is a criminal behavior. This is the crux of the matter.
For George Bush is cruel as well as incompetent. And it is not merely the careless cruelty of the rich and powerful who really cannot see those smaller and frailer and less well-connected. It is something we are almost ashamed to admit is our own now it is official sadism. Something he has made American. Beyond bullying. Beyond macho insensitivity. It is something he espouses and if you don’t like it you are unpatriotic. You’re maybe not “normal”. Maybe you’re not even “Christian”. His is indeed “God-driven”. He has used 9/11 to make himself a dictator.
There’s something perversely sexual about Bush’s wars. These wars have a peculiar “gender specific” bent to them. Men in Iraq are tortured and phootographs are taken so that others may know their shame. A sexual shame. One hears the voice of the army psychologist “explaining” the policy that Arab men are more the prisoners of macho myth than we are and how we can entirely humiliate them, complicating the humiliation by dragging Private Lindy England into the picture.
Does anyone remember that one of the reasons we went to war in Afghanistan was to stop the Taliban from butchering women who learned how to read? And now we collaborate with warlords who would have them raped on the way to school. The gender wars have taken a bitter turn in both countries. A turn towards the barbarous, the cruel. Mixed with sex, the perfect repressive formula. Puritanical. Complete misery. Cruelty for its own sake in the contorted photographs of our “enemies”, the corrupt reports of our generals, the mean-spirited snicker of our President. It hides unspeakable things, crimes against the human spirit he feels perfectly at ease committing. He is a dangerous man. We would follow him at our peril.
October 11, 2004
I Walk the Line
By Howard Zinn
I believe George Bush is the most dangerous p resident we have had in this century, or in any century dangerous to our lives and our liberties, a man who meets the definition of “high crimes and misdemeanors as required by the impeachment process and I would suggest impeachment except that we have an easier method coming up. Therefore I want John Kerry to win in November.
However, I also believe it is necessary for us to speak to John Kerry and let him now in as strong a way as we can, that, if he wants to win, he must begin to represent what is now a majority opinion in the American public, that our military intervention in Iraq is a disaster, for Americans, for Iraqis, for the world.
John Kerry needs to stop boasting of his physical courage in fighting in Vietnam, and talk of his moral courage in opposing that war. He needs to stop saying, as he did the other day in the Midwest, that he defended this country when he was fighting in Vietnam. That is not an honest statement. If it were true, than he would not have turned against the war. He was not defending this country when he fought in Vietnam. He was defending this country when he said we were wrong to be in Vietnam and we should get out.
He should not be saying about Iraq that he will wage the war better, that he will replace US troops with solders from other countries. If it is immoral for our soldiers to be occupying Iraq and killing Iraqis every day, it is immoral for foreign soldiers to do the same.
He should be clear: we are not defending our country by our war in Iraq and we should get out. He should stop saying what Bush is saying, that we have to “stay the course”. We stayed the course in Vietnam and it cost 58,000 American lives and millions of Vietnamese lives.
And for those who say we must not “cut and run”, John Kerry can say, with some authority, we did cut and run in Vietnam and it was the right thing to do. And if someone doesn’t like the words “cut and run”, he can say: “Okay, lets cut and walk.” Like those signs you see: “In case of fire, do not run, but walk to the nearest exit.” There’s a fire in Iraq whose flames we are fanning. Let’s walk.
September 30, 2004
The Future in the Past
By Staughton Lynd
I shall vote for John Kerry because of his statement to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in 1971. (Available at http://www.truthout.org/docs_04/082204F.shtml.) Kerry’s summary of the testimony of fellow soldiers at the Winter Soldier hearing in Detroit, several months before, displays the same anguish that so many of us felt from 1964 on. Kerry is in this sense a Movement candidate. Far more than Jimmy Carter or Bill Clinton he went through the Vietnam experience. At some level of his being he must have been stamped forever by it.
Of course, this fact does not explain away or excuse Kerry’s apparent intention to remain in Iraq until that war is won, whatever that means, or to support the government of Israel uncritically, or . . . so many things.
The analogy in my mind is to JFK’s election in 1960. Kennedy, too, was hardly Left of center at the time of his election. He permitted the Bay of Pigs to go forward. He and his brother Robert were insensitive to the Southern civil rights movement, and especially to SNCC. Yet we were able to pressure the Kennedys from below so that, for example in negotiating the nuclear test ban treaty and causing it to be passed by Congress, they accomplished much that was helpful and created political space within which the Movement could do more by its own means.
No matter who is elected, the time we are coming into is one in which we must all be prepared publicly to support servicemen and servicewomen who say No, whether in Iraq or before deployment.
October 5, 2004
Remembering with Advantages
By Fred Smoler
I cringed a bit when Kerry saluted and shouted that he was reporting for duty, but I knew what he was getting at, and I think most people did: he was drawing an illuminating and very pointed contrast. Given conscription in a democratic political order, serving your country in wartime may reasonably be considered one’s duty, while expertly playing the deferment system or using family influence to jump the queue into the National Guard was shirking that duty. If you weren’t too sure that serving in Vietnam was anyone’s duty, or if you were convinced that the moral obligation consisted in refusing to serve, the point might have been lost on you‹it periodically seemed to be lost on a number of New York Times editorialists‹and you might be inclined to mistake the shout as a species of jingoism, or moral idiocy, or simple militarism. There was indeed some of that, both at the Times and to points Left, but even in those cases, the contrast with the Bush and Cheney biographies tended to clarify the issue, at least for a while. In the wake of the Democratic convention, when Kerry rose in the polls, and the war news got steadily worse, it looked as if Kerry had found a magic bullet. It seemed that Vietnam, properly remembered, undercut Bush’s appropriation of the military virtues, and softened doubts about Kerry’s willingness to use force. In the minds of the more resolutely anti-war Democrats, moreover, the lessons of the old war could only remind the electorate that the new war was a catastrophe. Perhaps Bush had indeed found his Vietnam, not in Iraq, but in Vietnam.
Even if you rejected the absolute conflation of Vietnam with Iraq‹some did, and at first, most prominently, Kerry did himself‹the magic bullet had still found its target. When you remembered that Cheney had notoriously sneered that he’d had more important things to do than serve in Vietnam‹in a war he still supported‹and learned that while taking his MBA at Harvard soon after his Guard service, Bush had apparently boasted that he’d worked the system to avoid risking his life in Indochina, reporting for duty’ seemed to get the point across with admirable economy. The endless invocation of the band of brothers sometimes looked stagy and crass, but it seemed like a very effective way of breaking the Right’s rhetorical near-monopoly on values’, character’ and patriotism. Boasting about avoiding your obligations apparently spoke with inadvertent eloquence about your values and your character, and at least at first, it spoke volumes. A friend visiting the Army War College a month or so before the convention heard numbers of officers quoting Cheney with some savagery, one observing that at least 50,000 young Americans had had much better things to do. As for Bush, another officer observed that he’d known a lot of aviators, fixed wing and rotary, and that while they tended to lose a lot of things‹they seemed to be particularly careless about wives and girlfriends‹he’d never known one to lose a logbook. So in parts of Carlisle, PA, Bush was a barefaced liar, Cheney was shamelessly truthful, and Kerry had fought for his country. There was disquiet, and in many cases anger, about Kerry’s 1971 testimony, but it was more than counterbalanced by contempt for Bush and Cheney. And if this was what they were saying at the War College, one imagined that in Ohio, they’d be saying it with fewer reservations. But so far, it hasn’t turned out that way, although Kerry’s victorious tactics in the first debate may reverse the current yet again.
What went wrong? Famously, a committee of Swift Boat vets turned up to slander Kerry: he was a coward, a liar, he hadn’t deserved his medals, neither the first nor perhaps the second Purple Heart, not the Bronze Star, maybe not the Silver Star. The smears kept changing, but a fair summary of the narrative constructed around the charges would be that Kerry had solicited some of the medals to get out of a combat zone he’d never intended to enter‹when Kerry had requested the duty, it had not been nearly as hazardous as it became once the deployment of the boats changed‹and hadn’t deserved the others. In other words, he was on a moral par with Bush and Cheney, merely less successful in achieving the same end. He’d tried to avoid serving at all, and when that failed, he’d kept out of harm’s way; when the rules changed, he’d hazarded his life as briefly as possible, and gamed the system to get the hell out after four months.
In some versions of the smears, he’d invented, misrepresented or inflated the acts that had secured the decorations, in others he’d been the beneficiary of a culture in which medals had been shamelessly devalued, for all intents and purposes given away in crackerjack boxes: this was more or less the ingenious retort of one of the accusers, when it turned out that his own citation included a reference to the hostile fire he’d insisted had never happened, on an occasion that resulted in one of Kerry’s medals. In the more polite version, Kerry wasn’t directly at fault, but he deserved none of the honor wounds and decorations normally confer; in the less polite version, Kerry had plain lied, cooked the books, knowingly worn medals to which he had no moral claim.
When the dust settled, some of the smears had been discredited, and with slight exceptions, there was no persuasive reason to believe any of the others, since there was evidence on both sides, and never less for Kerry’s (and the Navy’s) version than for the ones asserted by his detractors. The exception seems to be a claim that Kerry had served in Cambodia on a particular Christmas day. That doesn’t seem to be true. Further evidence may yet come to light about some of the other assertions, one of which also involves service in Cambodia. One of the Purple Hearts may have been awarded for a wound unwittingly self-inflicted, and the wounds for one of the Purple Hearts were apparently trivial’; I use the inverted commas to avoid seeming to myself minimize any wounds suffered in combat, not least because I have not myself ever incurred any, nor, for that matter, served. I may be excessively timid; these considerations do not seem to have restrained a very large number of other commentators, so perhaps our mores are changing. A number of commentators have been admirably stoical about the wounds Kerry suffered, and have splendidly resisted any temptation to self-indulgent generosity when judging the honor appropriately awarded for someone else’s military service.
In any event, the strategy of the detractors was to paint Kerry as an alazon‹the comic butt who claims powers he does not possess‹indeed, as the most famous and ludicrous type of alazon, the Miles Gloriosus. On this account, Kerry is a boastful, swaggering soldier, secretly a coward, his heroic deeds are fictions, his courage an absurd lie, his reputation something to be utterly exploded, to demystifying and delicious effect. Even if this fails, any substantial diminishment of Kerry’s war record occludes the painful comparison with Bush and Cheney.
The potential difficulty with this approach was that there is no dispute that Kerry had dispatched twenty of his country’s enemies‹this is not a case of Cheney wittily vowing to eat as many a Kerry had killed. Nor is there any dispute that casualties in the Swift Boats could run to 90 per cent around the time that Kerry served in them, nor that four months is actually a long time in combat, as indeed four minutes can be‹the risk upon first exposure to combat is proverbial, and the source of a great deal of savagely ironical anecdote by veterans. Four months in combat compared very sharply with no time in combat, the record of Bush, Cheney, and some (although not all) of Kerry’s detractors. And after a month or so of what should have been grossly unseemly controversy, but somehow wasn’t so described while it dominated the news coverage, most of this set of charges against Kerry was dismissed by much of the mainstream media (although not by all of the bloggers).
Then came the error about Cambodia on Christmas Day. If you followed the chatter in the blogs, or spoke to some people on the Right, this Cambodia business was devastating, and in any case it was taken to somehow revive the plausibility of the previous charges about the medals–falsus in uno, falsus in omnibus. There was renewed glee on the blogs, and at other places on the web, and in conversations–they’d got the bastard now, this was the story that wouldn’t go away, despite the Liberal Media’s alleged refusal to touch the story (to other eyes, it rather looked as if the media spent the better part of a month obsessed with the story, to the exclusion of almost any other coverage of the campaign). But the happy triumph of the Swift Boat vets, by their own account, was now absolute: band of brothers, phooey.
What should fair-minded people think of Kerry’s mistake about being in Cambodia on Christmas Day? The specific text that gave us the phrase band of brothers’ is itself shrewdly apposite for anyone considering the allegedly damning, dispositive fact that Kerry had exaggerated his service in this one respect, and perhaps in others:
He that outlives this day, and comes safe home, Will stand a tip-toe when the day is named, And rouse him at the name of Crispian. He that shall live this day, and see old age, Will yearly on the vigil feast his neighbours, And say To-morrow is Saint Crispin:’ Then will he strip his sleeve and show his scars. And say These wounds I had on Crispin’s day.’ Old men forget: yet all shall be forgot, But he’ll remember with advantages What feats he did that day…
Illiterate groundlings apparently knew that people who’d secured imperishable glory at Agincourt, outnumbered ten to one, would also, inevitably, remember things with advantages; the comic can coexist with epic, the ordinary with the extraordinary, and not only as comic relief, as the plunge from high to low. This, the poet says, is what men are like, and their heroism survives our knowledge of the fact. You had to know wonderfully little about human nature to decide that on the strength of the Cambodia slip, Kerry was no worthy member of any band of brothers. Nonetheless, Kerry’s apparent lead had disappeared, and by late September Kerry’s use of his Vietnam service, which had dominated the convention, was widely written off as a catastrophic miscalculation: he’d invited scrutiny of his military record it couldn’t possibly have survived. The fact that the record had survived pretty much unscathed didn’t seem to matter. By September, Vietnam wasn’t a magic bullet, or if it was, it had at best misfired, and maybe it had been suicidal to bring it up at all. The smears were assumed to have worked because of some omni-competent Republican spin machine, a machine which its mourner-celebrants imagined could always make fantasy triumph over fact. Or maybe Vietnam was simply an irrelevancy: this is what the Times editorialists had written in the immediate aftermath of the Democratic convention: enough about the four months in combat, what about the almost forty years that had followed them? And soon enough, that was what the Right began saying, too.
The difficulty with this line of thought is that it risks missing what did happen between the Democratic convention and late September: Kerry lost his lead among women. And he seems to have lost it because of an inversion of traditional patterns of electoral behavior: this year, foreign policy apparently matters more to much of the electorate than domestic policy does, and, quite remarkably, women may be more concerned than men are with questions of national security. So it is worth considering the possibility that something about the memory of Vietnam was indeed relevant to how the Band of Brothers strategy had turned out, and how the election will turn out, if Bush in fact wins it. In the context of current realities, maybe there are some significant risks and weaknesses, as well as opportunities, in the way portions of the Democratic party talk about Vietnam.
After all, Kerry’s supporters had not restricted themselves to drawing inferences about character; they had made some other rhetorical moves on Vietnam. People began to argue that Kerry knew war, that Bush did not, and thus Kerry was uniquely entitled to speak on the subject. Kerry himself began to imply that his experience would have let him avoid some of the mistakes Bush had made, and that some of those mistakes were the consequence of Bush’s callow ignorance of war. The strong form of the argument ran that Bush and Cheney, like the neo-con civilians at the Pentagon, had not fought, so they simply had no right to advocate a war. This in fact echoed what many on the Right had said about Clinton in Bosnia and Kossovo, Haiti and Somalia, and what the anti-war Right had said about the neo-cons in both Iraq wars, although not about Bush and Cheney themselves. And the refrain began to be more audible, as his anti-war supporters tried to push Kerry off the fence: the mistake in going to war‹Kerry was not yet willing to say that going to war had been a mistake, although he would finally do so in the immediate run-up to the first debate, but many of his supporters were bolder‹was a mistake no veteran who remembered Vietnam would have made. This seems to have sounded a deal better at the Times than had all that than all that Band of Brothers stuff, and it may have sounded better to other Kerry supporters, too. One gets the impression that combat‹certainly combat in Vietnam– is not widely seen as a crucial test of character throughout the Kerry coalition.
But if you thought about it, this new argument verged on a militarist, even a fascist argument: bereft of the blood-knowledge of war, the civilians (and the women, etc.), should shut up about matters they have not earned the right to speak on. People who made this argument did not seem to recognize how appealing squadristi and stormtroopers would have found it. As it happens, the argument was also a very bad argument: combat experience does not have predictable effects on judgments about the wisdom of war, or about the best conduct of wars. Many of the most determined appeasers had fought in the First World War, as had many of the most bellicose fascists and Nazis. People can serve in combat and reach very bad conclusions about the merits of prospective wars, and about the lessons of war generally. Hitler was immensely proud of his very considerable combat experience, and relied upon it when making military policy; FDR, who did not see combat, was not on that account, or any other, the worse commander in chief; Lincoln had never seen combat, Jefferson Davis had, and so on, and on, and on. The vastly experienced British and French generals of the inter-war years were very confident that their experience had taught them the best way to prosecute the next war, and about the wisdom of delaying one. They had, quite notoriously, been tragically mistaken. Many of the Vietnam generation had misjudged the likely course of the first Iraq war, and for that matter, of the second. But despite its idiocy, this one “lesson”‹you didn’t fight, so you can neither speak nor lead in wartime‹did seem to resonate; it did not hurt the Democrats, indeed seemed to help them, and many Republicans were visibly embarrassed when it was drawn. Maybe the First World War soldier poets still cast a very long shadow, or, more plausibly, their argument, fused with a much older veneration for military experience, now half-inverted, has become a durable part of our culture. Even when CBS shamefully bungled the story of Bush’s behavior, the White House was initially silent, apparently fearing that any insistence that Bush had behaved honorably would be too easily refuted, would in fact prove disastrous. When CBS’s malfeasance and incompetence became the whole of the story, the harm done to Kerry was only indirect; Bush’s defenders did not try to rehabilitate him, but instead exulted in a Scotch verdict.
Nonetheless, for the two weeks leading up to the first debate, while the war news sounded dreadful, and while Kerry’s supporters started hammering ever more vigorously on the Vietnam analogy, Bush soared in the best-reported polls. For technical reasons, some of the most-reported polls were defective, but they still disclosed something real. Could the use to which the Democrats put the lessons of Vietnam’ have in fact helped Bush? If so, how?
Vietnam, like all wars, did not teach only one lesson, the lessons it taught were not invariably correct, or even applicable, and the lessons various sections of the electorate might have drawn from Vietnam were not necessarily the ones the Times editorialists kept drawing, week after week. For one thing. analogies between Vietnam and Iraq can be overdrawn: the Vietnamese Communists had a sanctuary in a neighboring state, they had the massive and open support of industrialized allies, they were unified in a disciplined Leninist party, and spoke for an ethnic and confessional majority. They lived among a peasantry, in swamps, mountains and jungle; the cities of South Vietnam were more or less controlled by their enemies. When they finally won‹it took decades, and cost millions of lives–they came to power on tanks, organized in divisions, employing conventional weapons and tactics. None of these things are yet true of the hard core of the Iraqi insurgents, or particularly likely to be true any time soon, or in most particulars, ever. Then again, none of these differences had been pointed up by the Republicans. The equation of Vietnam with Iraq resonated in two important ways: after Abu Ghraib, we seemed to be waging the war with inexcusable cruelty, and by the early fall, it began to be feared, with no apparent chance of success.
On the other hand, the much touted, and infinitely various (and contradictory) lessons of Vietnam’ had arguably contained some quite relevant information about what should have been done in Iraq, and what might still be done: counter-insurgency, nation-building, civil affairs, all the things the American army had once known at least something (and sometimes a great deal) about, and which some of the generals seemed to have willingly forgotten, lest they be expected to attempt those things again.
But for some Kerry’s supporters, for much of the anti-war camp, Vietnam contained no lessons about how the war in Iraq should be waged: it contained only lessons about how the war was a disastrous mistake, damned from its inception, and how it could never be successfully fought. In those quarters, the war could only be lost, with luck as quickly as possible, to spare the Iraqis and the Americans further suffering. The suffering that the American war in Vietnam had caused on all sides was something these people understood very clearly; what they chose not to understand was that a significant portion of Vietnamese suffering–the gulags, the long imprisonment in an immiserated tyranny, now evolved into a corrupt kelptocracy, the hundreds of thousands of refugees–was the product of the American defeat. One of Kerry’s problems about Vietnam was almost certainly that some of its lessons’ were too clear to his supporters, every bit as clear as they had been in 1975, and every bit as relevant, and that certain other lessons were inadmissible.
Still, the bulk of the electorate did not seem to be worrying too much about the suffering an American withdrawal might inflict on the Iraqis. One lesson of Vietnam seemed to be that if a people will not defend themselves, Americans cannot forever defend them. Another lesson that did reward Kerry seemed to come out of Abu Ghraib. The swift boat vets, among others, had been enraged when Kerry had in 1971 condemned the Vietnam war as defined by its atrocities. The statements they quoted did not quite read, to my eyes, as insisting that all American troops in Vietnam had committed atrocities. But they had been read that way, were still being read that way, and the awkward fact is that some of the anti-war movement had made precisely such an argument at the time, and ever after. The argument was a version of the one made famous in Ponetecorvo’s The Battle of Algiers: atrocity is the inevitable tactic of the colonial power, which will just as inevitably lose. This was not necessarily irrelevant to the strength of the anti-war case about Iraq; after Abu Ghraib, when news of American atrocities in Iraq became undeniable, the bulk of the electorate seemed to recoil from the war. Public sentiment seemed to shift, and the anti-war camp began to publicly draw Pontecorvo’s lesson, which by 1975 had long become its own: we are the colonialists, our war’s elemental moral meaning is inevitable atrocity, and inevitable (and just) defeat. Our enemies, meanwhile, must gain in moral stature, if we, their foes, are so vile: they are best understood as nationalists, not as Stalinists, or terrorists, or jihadists. Their victory, while it will involve cruelty, is somehow on the right side of history; it is hubris to seek to oppose, or even delay it. The center of the electorate did not seem to go so far, but Abu Ghraib had shaken them. And still, by September, Kerry was losing, among people who seemed to think that he did not have the will to defend them.
Perhaps the electorate sensed something about the Vietnam comparison, and about the eagerness with which it had been invoked. I suspect that it may have sounded too cheerfully defeatist, and, especially in the wake of Beslan, some people seemed uneasy about their prospective political leaders looking too willing to chuck it in. That, after all, was the lesson the New York Times was drawing from Vietnam: this new war, like that old one, was so obviously unnecessary and un-winnable, perhaps it was best to give it up, concentrate on the real enemy’, we said so at the beginning, and we’re repeating it now, perhaps a bit smugly. But it seemed that important elements of the electorate‹most crucially, a significant number of women–did not entirely trust people who were eager to bolt from Iraq to choose to fight anywhere else. In the wake of Beslan, with three hundred and fifty or so children murdered by people who rather sounded like the people killing American troops in Iraq, and like people who had earlier killed American civilians in Manhattan, it looked as if a crucial percentage of the electorate wanted leaders who might be willing to seek out that enemy, to bring the war to them.
Although not necessarily in Iraq. Everything Bush had done seemed to a large number of voters to be wrong, or at least to have failed. But simultaneously, a clear majority of the electorate thought that Bush could be better trusted to fight terrorism‹despite the fact that they simultaneously suspected that much (maybe everything) of what he’d done to date had turned out badly. If the ghosts of Vietnam haunted the campaign in ways more subtle than the editorialists seemed to think, it seemed likely that the most dangerous ghost was the suspicion that in the wake of Vietnam, the Democrats had become a party who, while unwilling to fight an unnecessary war, might well be unwilling to fight a just or possibly necessary one, either. Perhaps Iraq-as-Vietnam could make people remember the Clinton who had been unwilling to fight a just war in Rwanda, rather than the Republicans who had hysterically opposed him over Kossovo, or recall the Clinton who had let Bosnian Muslims die, rather than the Clinton who had brought their torment to an end (or the first Bush, whose cynical derelictions had allowed the Bosnian catastrophe to erupt). Maybe Iraq-as-Vietnam made people remember the Carter of the hostage crisis, rather than the Reagan who slunk away from Marines slaughtered in Beirut.
In the wake of the first debate, Kerry, prematurely written off, was suddenly again in close contention. During the debate, Kerry argued that the war had not been necessary when it was fought, but that defeat would be catastrophic, that he would not shrink from preemptive war, and that he would win the war Bush had started. He promised victory‹as he had done in Boston, after which his stock had also risen. Yet as the race entered its final month, popular doubts about Kerry remained what they had been in September: that he could not be trusted to defend the people against terror. It seems possible that a crucial section of the electorate, while it had drawn many of the same lessons from Vietnam that the candidate had, was nonetheless uneasy that he had taken those lessons too inflexibly to heart.
October 10, 2004
A Fan’s Note
By Benjamin DeMott
Election times are hell on self-respect. Usually when I hear or read political garbage I don’t give it an automatic pass and don’t worry much about being snobbish or self-indulgently eccentric. Usually I’m clear that genuine sacrifice is one thing and getting a moral rush from other people’s pain is another. Usually I hate the world of they say and believe there’s nothing shameful about trying to be your own man.
But when the partisan heat is up, forget it. Everything changes. The questioning critic in me dopes off. In the aftermath of the first presidential debate a consensus began to build that “my” candidate wasn’t disastrously stiff after all, had a certain command of issues, looked “presidential” and so on. Friends who had previously badmouthed Kerry for pomposity suddenly found reason to take a second look. Some read the shifting poll numbers as evidence of the fundamental health of democracy. I felt gratified by what was happening. I was heartened by TV replays of “my” candidate’s scores and the other man’s grimacing errors relished exchanges in which rounded-up half-truths encouraged faith in fluency as the highest virtue. Suckered into the delights of belonging, I became for days a Kerry guy.
Yes I know solidarity has had decent uses in the past and will have them again in the future. The point is that election time is self-simplification time. The temptation grows to stop being a person who thinks – a thinking being as distinguished from a fan. Somebody sustained by the habit of trying to talk back to pseudo-thought wherever it originates, in political season and out the stuff that paves the world with con.
I’m venting, of course. When you feel yourself being not so gradually massified back into the natural human mediocre state, you vent. The case is that I can’t wait for the day after Election Day and the chance to aspire to a better self.
October 9, 2004
[Benjamin DeMott is the author most recently of “Whitewash as Public Service: How the 9/11 Commission Report Defrauds the Nation” in the October Harper’s magazine.]
The House that I Live In
By Kurt Vonnegut
THE OVERWHELMING POPULARITY OF BUSH, IN SPITE OF EVERYTHING, FINALLY SHOWS US WHAT THE AMERICAN PEOPLE, WHOM WE HAVE SO SENTIMENTALZED FOR SO LONG, A LA NORMAN ROCKWELL, REALLY ARE AND ALWAYS HAVE BEEN.
September 23, 2004
“There Are So Many of Them”
By Scott Spencer
We, the people who want Bush out, are approaching a state of nervous collapse. We are slapping our foreheads, pointing in disbelief we simply cannot understand how anyone can find this smirking, strutting President likeable, or trustworthy, humane, or even competent. But they’re out there, tens of millions of them, and we’d sort of like to wring their necks. And why? Because we think they’d like to wring our necks.
The politics of unseating the President has something desperate at the core of it the feeling that our government has been hijacked by a group of ideologues who actively despise us, actors, writers, trade unionists, environmentalists, feminists, gay activists, New Yorkers, San Franciscans, etc etc. The fierce, pitiless eyes of the Bush gang burn holes in our chests, and now, with thirty days to go before the election or what one friend calls “the pre-recount” mwe are out there pulling for Senator Kerry as if our very lives depend on his victory. Democrats accuse Bush of playing on the peoples’ post 911 fear, and he is, he is, but so far the most deeply frightened people I have seen in this election or in any American election have been the people who want the Bush out of power. Mass arrests, further illegal detentions, the complete disintegration of our alliances, widespread bloodshed, nuclear Armageddon, it all seems horribly possible.
The old liberal swagger is gone the sense that Kennedy supporters and Clinton supporters had that their candidate and they themselves were so much looser and cooler and sexier and contemporary than anything calling itself a Republican. (Now it seems as if the Republicans have more logged in more hours getting high than the Dems!) And in place of our old superiority complex has come a sense of hopelessness, and isolation. Of course we’ve recently had the experience of actually winning an election and then having it bullied right out of our hands and you could fill a book with left wing blogs about chicanery already in place for this upcoming election.
Since the first debate, the polls seem to be tilting slightly in Kerry’s direction. But most of us keep our eyes on a few states, a few districts. We’re more than content to squeeze out a victory in the Electoral College. Screw the popular vote. We’ll take our blue states, as few as they are. As to the others no love lost. We have gotten the message — the Pentecostals and the people of Utah would just as soon we not exist, all those people, all those so-called red states. And there are so many of them. It’s the new Red Scare, and this time it’s not the little old ladies in Peoria quaking in their tennis shoes, it’s us. Since 2000, liberals have been talking about taking their country back. What none of us is talking about is our greatest fear that it isn’t really our country at all, not any longer. Will we show the grit and confidence of the hard right if the Republicans succeed in pushing us to the margins of political life?
October 2, 2004
Rats and Mice
By Stanley Aronowitz
To begin with I want to stipulate that Bush and his cabal are a bunch of dirty, stinking, cheating rats. That’s all that needs saying about them. Except for the fact that half the American electorate — most white men over age 25, a hefty portion of millionaires, the eighth of the voters who are self-defined Christian fundamentalists, members of the armed forces and people in small towns and in the countryside — is willing to ignore Bush’s chronic lying, that truth should be enough to produce a landslide victory for the Democrats. But it won’t. In fact, John Kerry, a devout centrist who voted for the war resolution, the Patriot Act, NAFTA, and the Welfare Reform Act of 1996 that abrogated the only guaranteed income program in American history, will be lucky to squeak past a President who has presided over an immensely unpopular and largely unsuccessful war and an economy that can’t produce good jobs but has created wage stagnation for most people.
The three debates between Kerry and Bush have elevated the challenger from a sure loser in early September, to a probable winner, but only if the Democratic Party establishment opposes the GOP’s vote-stealing tactics and is willing to fight in the courts and in the streets to prevent another election robbery. If the Democrats put stability ahead of victory they will repeat the 2000 fiasco when Al Gore called upon his followers to quit the barricades and respect the Supreme Court’s gift to Bush. If the election hangs on vote fraud, I suspect the DP’s Centrist leadership will choose defeat rather than taking the risk of sparking chaos. The DP establishment is, in the first place, republican in classic sense, not democratic.
Even before he vanquished his opponents in the primaries, Kerry knew he has the left and the liberals in his pocket. This cancels out the fundamentalist Christians, except in electoral college terms. Add blacks, a substantial portion of Latinos, legions of party loyalists and he draws even with Bush. Kerry’s recitations of Bush’s calumnies, especially on the war and the economy, is designed to solidify his base and, simultaneously reach out to undecided constituencies, maybe 3-5% of the vote. Kerry and his handlers have chosen to direct their rhetoric to the dead center. Rather than raising the economic stakes in the campaign by openly adopting a class-based, redistributive perspective or aiming to register new voters currently outside the pool of “likely” voters, Kerry offers himself as the genuine conservative candidate resisting Bush’s military Keynesian spending spree.
Make no mistake: invoking fiscal responsibility has nothing to do with the party’s populist past: it is reminiscent of the pre-New Deal Franklin Roosevelt who attacked Herbert Hoover as a big spender.
Meanwhile, activist union members, liberal religionists, Move On, American Come Together and dozens of other so-called 527s have raised hundreds of millions of dollars and placed tens of thousands volunteers in the streets, registering maybe two million new voters, especially poor blacks, Latinos and college students. Of course Kerry’s key strategists — the Democratic Leadership Council which Kerry joined long — has no intention of offering these social formations more than a fig leaf of promises: tuition college credit for students, a higher minimum wage and, folks, that’s about it. Uunless you count the senator’s exhilarating jobs program i.e. tax credits to businesses that hire American workers. In short, while his liberal tail enlarges the election rolls, Kerry provides no reason except ABB to vote. What’s going on? While Bush can dress up as a compassionate conservative, even as he has fostered policies that widen the gap between rich, middle class and poor, the centrists who control the Democratic Party would rather lose than advocate policies that would redistribute wealth. They won’t propos to create public jobs with public funds; to establish real homeland security by expanding airport and train inspections (among other measures); to fund more teachers in public school classrooms; to expand environmental protection; to create new low and middle income public housing; to guarantee universal health care; to broaden day care services to unemployed and working parents. Mention the word liberal as Bush has repeatedly done in the last three weeks of the campaign, and the Democrats rip a page from the discredited playbook of Michael Dukakis who, in 1988, renounced ideology in favor of technical competence and threw the election to Bush’s father, one of the least able of American presidents. It remains unclear whether the Democrats can be tarnished with labels of “left” and “liberal” in the wake of their blatant surrender of their own progressive traditions, but even if Kerry wins, he will enter the White House with no real mandate for change. His victory would be a signal for liberals and left to climb back into their holes and resume business as usual — bitching and moaning and warning everybody else to keep quiet, lest the right be resurgent. Guess what? If the right loses on November 2, their 2008 campaign begins on November 3 because they believe they are anointed to rule. On the other hand, since Jimmy Carter’s term in office, the Democrats desperately seek defeat.
October 16th
Rough Around the Edges
By Charles O’Brien
I’m not where I want to be.
The 2000 campaign offered two uninspiring candidates in an unheroic time. After a run of fat years, where reflection was scare, and distraction was rife, the electorate was offered competing insurance plans. Even before the Supreme Court, in a new low, voted its preference, the public had been worn down enough to accept any result. 2001 started unpromising. A campaign by stealth and victory by dissimulation had produced a President of obvious limitations. The Republicans were the dominant party, and they were not reticent about wielding power. There was hardly an opposition to speak of. Bush’s legislation passed easily, and even his more controversial appointments were confirmed without much fuss.
9/11, as we see, did not change everything. It did change some things, though, and did change some people. But mostly, for most people, it has clarified things. But to some, to many of those who style themselves a Left – here and elsewhere – 9/11 has been a source of befuddlement, the Great Wha Happen??
Whatever a left may be, it should at least have been: unbeholden to Pakistan and Saudi Arabia; unenamored of stability; contemptuous of Islamism; at ease with the idea of force as amelioration. It should have looked at our enemies – and in the first place, it would have needed to see them as enemies, rather than the REVOLUTION, Minute Men, la resistance – as our enemies, of whom our loathing was greater than theirs of us, and said, as Brecht once did:
Von diesen Staedten wird bleiben
der durchdem sie hindurchging, der Wind!
There’ll be left, of these cities, what
passed through them, the wind.
Instead, what became the anti-war left, responded with:
a refusal to reconsider –
What you knew at midnight on Sept. 10 was still true at nightfall on Sept. 11, truer than ever. Unsurprising was the unsurprised Chomsky, crying Remember al-Shifa. An article in the Nation praised one anti-war activist who said that two seconds after he heard about the Twin Towers, he realized that he must start organizing immediately. “Don’t mourn” didn’t use to mean this, quite. The slogan, Justice, Not Revenge, enjoyed a vogue. This is a law enforcement matter. Seeing people jump from the 100th floor led easily enough to the realization that what’s wrong with America is the jails are underpopulated. Not In Our Name: it was assumed that military measures undertaken with overwhelming public support and near-unanimous Congressional approval should be forestalled by the disapproval of we few, we self-satisfied few, who didn’t see things had changed all that much
an attribution of bad motives –
Afghanistan was invaded to install a gas pipeline (three years later, there is no sign of one, and in fact, negotiations for one were livest during the Clinton administration). Yassir Arafat, Nobel Laureate and statesman, said that the motive was to enable millions of Afghan Jews to come to Palestine to steal land. Iraq was invaded, by forces from 30 countries (and American troops were evacuated from Saudi Arabia, as part of Operation Iraqi Freedom), for one simple reason: oil. And cheaper oil would ensure ush’s re-election. Iraq was invaded at the behest of the Likud1. Jews are behind it. Christian missionaries were to be given the run of the place. (In fact, Iraqi Christians are being driven out.) George W. Bush invaded Iraq to avenge/impress/show up his father, and figures like James Woolsey shared his Oedipal obsession.
This summer, it was announced that certain buildings in New York and Newark were threatened with attacks. For real? No, said Howard Dean, the announcement was made two days after the Democratic convention. (He said this before Kerry’s appearance at midnight on the last night of the Republican convention. Kerry couldn’t wait one more hour to denounce Dick Cheney for getting a raft deferment when he was 18.) Saddaam’s capture in mid-December was timed to coincide with…mid-December. Homeland Security is an excuse to strip us of our rights. Using Richard Reid as a pretext, the Bush administration has got what it wanted all along: to look at the American people’s stocking feet.
fake pacifism –
There is something admirable about principled pacifists. In some times and places, their pacifism as cost them dearly, even to the death. And when things have been not as harsh, they must still live with the uncomfortable intellectual consequences of their position. Fake pacifism is not admirable. You can’ay: Violence is always wrong, and by the way, who’re we talking about? “If there is war, people will be killed.” True, but in “peace” i.e. non-belligerence, people are killed. What the guy said, you must choose. A magazine with the word “Socialist” in the title ran a cover picture of a boy in a hospital bed with a heavily bandaged leg. And in bold letters, “This is why we oppose the war.” A hurt child is evocative, but something other than an argument. What had happened here? Nobody involved with the publication of the photo could be trusted not to lie, so we must speculate. A hurt child in a hospital bed in the world one is up against, such a photo is the pornography of fine feeling is relatively well-off. In the photo, he had a leg, so he had not fallen victim to a Taliban mine. He had a foot, so he had not suffered cross-amputation as shari’a provides for petty theft. If his injury was war-related – and no reason to believe it was what were the war’s causes and consequences? Our socialists might have more convincingly declared: this is why we oppose roller skates.
I
And since 9/ll, a long decline. From the earliest interventions for “peace” to Feb. 15, 2003, when the World Said No To War (When in history has The World said no to war? Not on Feb. 15, and not before or after.) to the Deaniac phenomenon to the Kerry candidacy, from the happy few of Not in Our Name to the Band of Brothers.
In the early years of the XX Century, Georg Lukacs, wrestled with his, and Europe’s, situation. There is a real grandeur about the enterprise, even if his answer was wrong (and clearly so). He looked at Lenin (and Stalin, and Malenkov, and Khruschev) and saw the Party: History’s consummation. But the Party was made up of, and finally was only, these guys.
The opposition to George W. Bush has wished up the alternative to him. They have willed into being the embodiment of Anybody But Bush, and it is this guy. John Kerry is said to be better on domestic issues. It’s hard to tell. Much of his campaign has been, “I have a plan”, sometimes a secret plan, and you must elect him before he’ll fill you in, “I would do things very differently”, “I would do a better job”. Kerry is as convincing as his is inspiring. FDR was reviled as a traitor to his class. Does anyone believe that of John Kerry?
It’s hard to care about his domestic agenda. Single-issue voting is, generally, for suckers. Not this time out. The military trappings of the Democratic convention conceded as much. Well-wishers have urged Kerry (or the Democrats more broadly) to run “to the right” on the war (as if blowing up hitlerians were the special province of the right!), or even claiming that he’s actually doing so..
Where is Kerry on the war? The Republicans call him a “flip-flopper”; his supporters call him “nuanced”. Nearer to the truth would be to note Kerry’s parallel lives. John Kerry was an early opponent of the Vietnam War; tried to get a deferment to study in France; was a leader of the V.V.A. W.’ was a generic Democrat from Massachusetts; advocated the freeze; and was generally dovish; was sympathetic to the Sandinistas; voted against the first Gulf War; opposed, or something, the war in Iraq; is international-minded. John Kerry volunteered for the Navy during the Vietnam War; solicited decorations there; re-enacted his exploits there on film; became a prosecutor; supported, or something, the war in Iraq; has, past parody, run on his military career, culminating in his “reporting for duty” shtik this summer. If it turns out that there’s no real John Kerry in the space between (no “moral core”), that’s just gossip. What matters is which of the two Kerry’s would govern. The warlike one is the opportunist one, most consistently on display at his stealth convention. The unwarlike one is, if not his “core”, certainly his base.
“Respected in the world.” He has promised to convene a summit. A summit! Summits are hardly even news, much less the main objective of an administration’s foreign policy. And who would attend this summit, and to what end? France insists that les resistants from Iraq be there. At that table, who would be dinner? Kerry frequently invokes “our allies”. But nobody is inherently “our allies”. The United States, has gone to war against England and Germany; very nearly done so against France and Russia. Syria signed on for the first Gulf War; with any luck we will soon oversee the destruction of the regime there. “Our allies”, you’d think, are those that are allied with us. But no, says Kerry, those actually allied with us are only a “coalition of the coerced and bribed”. In fact, the coerced Zapatero and the bribed Chirac are both leaders who would prefer a Kerry presidency (and would still not lift a finger to help the American effort). “Our allies” might include Russia: would Kerry like to see Grozny methods rolled out in Iraq? Ultimately, for Kerry, “our allies”” is France. Think of the last French election. Jospin was the candidate of the generic, generically anti-American left and of those with a nostalgia for the good old days of solidarity with the FLN. Le Pen, as much as he detests North African immigrants, finds the Americans and the Jews still more odious, and so supports the Iraqi Baa’th Party. Chirac has been in bed with Saaddam forever. The counterweight to all this is John Kerry’s charm.
John Kerry’s faith in the United Nations Organization is well past a sell-by date. Since Sept. 12, 2002, the American public has seen, over and over, the U.N. display its incapacity and bad faith. When Kofi Annan, advertising his ignorance, called the Iraq War “illegal”, he left unanswered, what would, or could, he then do about it? George W. Bush, against all opprobrium, distinguished the U.N. from the League of Nations – presumably Annan’s job by enforcing its binding resolutions at the cost of American blood.
But enough about summits, allies, U.N.’s, all those non-voting constituencies. They won’t determine the war’s course, as long as Kerry is not President.[2] Kerry’s own inclinations we can guess at. What Bush calls (not too felicitously) the Global War on Terror, Kerry distinguishes into the pursuit of Usaama Bin Laadin (good) and the war in Iraq (not so good). Take Iraq first. Kerry says he would have fought it “better”. Bush, he says, “rushed to war.” Bush did no such thing, and a war launched in March 2002 might have been better. (It’s not hard to imagine a Michael Moore style documentary only true about that year’s grace given Saddaam.[3] Bush failed to get the U.N.’s support: not needed, and not possible. Bush should only have gone to war “as a last resort” (by which Kerry means “never”). Kerry says that Saddaam had no ties to al-qaa’ida (untrue); that Saddaam posed no imminent threat, even though Bush said exactly that — part of his doctrine of pre-emption was the obsolescence of imminence as a policy consideration; and that Iraq had no WMD’s. On this last point, there are many opinions. My own is that Saddaam did have them. If you don’t know what happened to them, assume the worst (as Saddaam’s conduct warranted). “It’s not here” doesn’t equal “It doesn’t’ exist”. Ricin has appeared in Europe A major attack with chemical weapons was reportedly attempted in Jordan, the objectives 80,000 deaths. Syria recently tested poison gas on civilians in Darfur. But Kerry says only, no WMD. He says that Bush has offered 23 separate rationales for toppling Saddaam (and surely there were many more than 23 rationales for doing so). If Kerry denies the war’s justifications, how would he support it? His “major speech” on the war, at NYU, was all about getting out, complete with disastrously timetables. When he talks, as he does intermittently, about staying the course in Iraq, he is like nothing so much as a prosecutor pressing a meritless case because letting the innocent defendant off might make the office look bad. Which is worse, the ethics, or the tactics?
Iraq apart, Kerry’s version of the war is, it’s a big law-enforcement operation. If we’re attacked, we’ll hit back (Thanks). We will continue the hunt for UBL (even though there is no reason to think he is alive, and his death has resolved/will resolve next to nothing). Bush “took his eye of the ball in Tora Bora.” although we don’t know that UBL was there; although our utmost military presence there could not have guaranteed UBL’s apprehension there; although lingering Sept. 10 sentiment at home and Bush’s perhaps unavoidable deference to it worked to prevent such a presence. Iraq was a “distraction” all the while American special ops are successfully engaging the enemy all around the world. Bush’s approach is a restrained maximalism. Kerry’s is too little, too late, cops and robbers and joint declarations. The enemy, has promised the “storm of planes” will continue; John Kerry threatens a flurry of (unenforceable) arrest warrants.
In a long article in the New York Times Magazine, he is quoted comparing terror to prostitution. (All right, where is his moral core?) Prostitutes should be treated with respect, jihadis exterminated. On October 11, Michael Meehan, a senior spokesman for the Kerry campaign, was on tv trying to explain Kerry’s comments away. He insinuated that Kerry’s comments which the Bush campaign, understandably, had seized on had been made up. Meehan added this: Kerry as a young man had “fought terrorists.” That “terrorist” is a malleable term has long been well-known, and that John Kerry can put Vietnam to just about any use is not unfamiliar, but this conjunction is, well, inventive. And there are “terrorists” and “terrorists.” Muhammad Ali said that no Viet Cong every called him nigger. But every al Quaeda calls him, and all of us, kaffir. And when the last American helicopter left Saigon, it was with the understanding that we’d never have to lay eyes on them again, that they’d never have to lay eyes on us again. In this war, there is no such understanding. It is the opposite understanding that has caused the war. And if what John Kerry did there was “fighting terrorists”, does he think he got the job done?
Kerry’s problem is not just that he hasn’t learned anything since Sept 10, 2001, but that he hasn’t learned anything in the past 30 years. He rarely talks about his twenty years in the Senate (or as the ponderous John Forbes Kerry says, the senate of the United States), and George Bush says it’s because his record there is too undistinguished and too liberal. Rather, it’s too recent, and Kerry can’t make sense of it to himself. During his debates with George Bush, Kerry said that he had a plan, yes, and that, yes, he could do better, but he also said that George Bush offered “more of the same.” Now Kerry is nothing but more of the same. As he told the Times, “We have to get back to the place we were”. The Kerry campaign has uttered the phrase, “as a young man”, more than VH-I ever has. Kerry’s musical references stand looking at. In one report, Peter Yarrow (of Peter Paul & Mary) was traveling on Kerry’s campaign bus, the Real Deal Express would John Kerry, when not condescending to the public, describe anything as the “real deal”? and at one point, Kerry said to him, “Give us a song, Pedro?” Pedro? For a while, his campaign was using Jimi Hendrix’s “Fire” as a theme song. “Let me stand next to your fire.” John Kerry? They also played Elvis Presley’s “A Little Less Conversation”, a song they should have known Dick Cheney, curled lip and all, owns. And lately, Bruce Springsteen’s “No Retreat, No Surrender” has become their official song a song, 20 years old, about nostalgia. If Kerry had any sense, he would have gone to Tyrone Davis for a theme song: not this one’s too easy “Baby, Can I Change My Mind?”, but “If I Could Turn Back the Hands of Time.”
II
The house of Bush-hatred has many mansions. Here are a few of the main complaints.
He’s a drunken frat boy.
That frat boy belongs to the same college fraternity as John Kerry did. Bush used to drink and now doesn’t. And…? The Democratic Party, whose song was once “Happy Days Are Here Again”, now purses it lips and thinks that because it is virtuous that there shall be no more cakes and ale. [4]
Florida.
The 2000 election is said to have been stolen. First, whoever will defend Samir al-Arian or Ralph Nader or the U.S. Supreme Court needs to be quiet about this. Second, we should recall what the two parties said at the time. The Republicans said simply that they had won. The Democrats said, over and over, Count every vote.5 The Republicans could exclude whatever votes they liked. The Democrats could exclude none, and only argue vainly, it turned out for votes here and there. Unconscionable as the Republicans’ methods were, and however many if-onlies the Democrats had, Gore never had the majority of Florida’s votes in hand. The result was certainly unfair, but the election can’t be called stolen at most, expropriated.
2002 was to be the payback for the recount battles. It wasn’t. Today, Jeb Bush is the easily re-elected Governor, and Katherine Harris is in the House of Representatives. The Florida and Federal legislatures are solidly Republican. The Bush v. Gore 5 still sit on the Supreme Court. As rallying cries go, “Florida” is pretty wan.
His assault on civil liberties.
In fact, people can speak, write, assemble as they please. George W. Bush can be freely called, among other things, traitor and deserter both capital offenses. On the other side, Michael Moore announces that he has a team of defamation lawyers primed to protect Fahrenheit 9/11 from criticism; the Kerry campaign’s legal muscle sends threatening letters to tv stations to try to dissuade them from running hostile ads; and Chad Clanton, a spokesman for the same campaign, says of Sinclair Broadcasting, who will broadcast an anti-Kerry film, “They better hope we don’t win.”
His whole manner.
And this one covers a lot. Bush, like Kerry is a New Englander. But Bush has turned himself into a Texan kind of a hyper-Texan. It might be useful to think of it as performance art. Not every Texan owns a ranch, or wears Western clothes, or walks that way.
It is his speech that is most hyper-Texan and farthest removed from his roots. Think of him, the son of George H.W. Bush, and familiar from childhood with Washington insiders, addressing Vladimir Putin as Pooty-Poot. He has been eloquent, when occasion demanded, but his usual slapdash speech is a foreswearing of eloquence. Jay Leno occasionally runs clips of Bush speaking Spanish where he is easy, unhalting, in full command followed by Bush in English two or three pratfalls on the way to an awkward conclusion. In 2000,m the Bush campaign was accused of inserting subliminal messages in a tv ad. Asked about it, Bush struggled with the word, managing no better than something like sublimimable. The performance raised two questions, both answered, No: Can this guy get to the end of one four-syllable world? And, Can this guy be devious enough to play with people’s heads? And notice: only the second question matters. His gaffes are famous putting food on your family, etc. but you know what he means. It’s easy to put his verbal gaffes down to stupidity, except that you don’t know what he knows. To someone in thrall to Enlightenment ideology, he must seem the very image of the unenlightened: malicious and dumb. Better, he just started from a different point of view.
The cultural gap between Bush and those who detest him also involves his religion. He is regarded as a fanatic, an extremist. But he’s a Methodist, not a snake handler. The upper reaches of his own denomination condemned the invasion of Iraq (testimony, of course, to their firm conscience and high principle). It is something of a commonplace that George W. Bush is Usaama’s mirror image. Though this be Methodism, yet there’s madness to it! It is odd that Bush should be attacked for meaning the professions that public figures make. And it’s odd that he should be far more forbearing toward the secular-minded than they are toward him.
He has made the world, and America in particular, a more dangerous place.
The world is a dangerous place. Bush acknowledges that fact. Was America safer in 1993 or 1999, or 2000? John Kerry likes to call attention to the 1,000 Americans dead in Iraq. But the choice, in Iraq or elsewhere, was never between 1,000 deaths or zero. The almost 3,000 dead in New York could easily have been a much higher number. Nobody should think there can’t be another major attack here, nor that it can’t involve some sort of WMD. Against the 1,000 dead in Iraq we should put the something like 2,000,000 lives taken by jihad in Sudan alone.
We’re not at the end of anything. But the more resolved, the sooner resolved.
III
The “left” opposition to Bush today embodied in John Kerry’s candidacy – involves no principle worth holding. It is no more than resting on class prejudice, wishing away unpleasantness, and shoring up certitude with fantasy. It finds Bush, above all, unsettling. Mickey Kaus, of Slate, who certainly has no illusions about John Kerry nevertheless endorsed him, because Bush was just too much excitement. A while ago, it was revealed that The Osbournes was George Bush’s favorite tv program; and so, Ozzy was invited to a dinner where he could meet Bush. Catching sight of the President, he lowered his head and shook it back and forth. He called out to Bush, “Ya should wear your hair like this.” Bush answered: “Second term, Oz!” And yet Ozzy has declined to endorse the President’s re-election. It’s understandable: Ozzy’s been through a lot and is a delicate mechanism.
The rest of us have nothing to fear.
Notes
1 While the world was focused on the war in Iraq, Israel would ethnically cleanse the territories, or even the pre-67 Israel. No such thing happened, of course, although the Cuban regime did take advantage of the time by launching a new wave of repression.
2 After the fall of Saddaam, Donald Rumsfeld was in Europe, addressing a group of political leaders there. He noted that some of those present had declared themselves neutral as between Saddaam and the United States. “Shocking. Absolutely shocking,” he said, and there wasn’t a peep out of them. Kerry’s “reaching out’ would include nothing so forceful.
3 Actually, twelve years’ grace, since Saddaam had started violating the cease-fire in 1991,and the penalty for violations of cease-fires is, though it’s often forgotten, the full resumption of hostilities.
4 Bush and Kerry complement each other nicely. Kerry wants his life to end in his early twenties. When, under pressure, he points to his record as a legislator, it’s embarrassing. Bush and this excites resentment writes off his life before 40 as wayward youth. But why shouldn’t he? His finds his earlier self wearisome, and who would expect anything there a DWI? to hold any great interest to anyone else?
In his way, George W. Bush is truer to the spirit of the Sixties. A tab of acid, or whatever else, could be that the thing that made your past life a thing of the past.
5 i.e. they never claimed they had won and can’t now claim they were robbed of a victory.
October 15, 2004
Vote and Die
By Kurt Vonnegut
OUR PLANET’S IMMUNE SYSTEM IS OBVIOUSLY TRYING TO GET RID OF US, AND HIGH TIME! BUT VOTE FOR SOMEBODY ANYWAY. WHAT THE HELL.
September 24, 2004