For use: Sunday, October 22, 2000 and thereafter

 

"For the future: Vote for Gore and Bush "

by Michael Finley

What is the immediate fate of democracy in America?

There are two scenarios duking it out. The one features technology as a liberating , democratizing force that frees people up to do their own thinking. This is the Tom Paine scenario, in which informed yeoman and yeowomen call the shots, because they know what's going on, they know where their best interests lie, and they demand to be heard -- indeed, they cannot be silenced. It's an attractive scenario, provided people get around to the thinking part.

The other scenario has the future being taken over by big controlling powers -- the media, big money, big politics. They shape what we hear and read, and as effectively as any totalitarian country, they manage our sense of the world, down to the nano-nuance.

I see Scenario 2 doing awfully well right now.

We are witnessing the commandeering of a national election by the Big Lie. On the Republican side, long before a single primary vote was cast it was decided that George W. Bush, the 6-year governor of Texas, was the only serious candidate for the presidential nomination. No one ever got to vote for Libby Dole. The important decision  was made by the masses of money raised by "The Pioneers" and other mysterious groups, far from from the nasty surprises of actual elections.

Reactionary forces decided some years ago they aren’t comfortable with the free choice offered in Scenario 1, because they cannot steer a population making informed choices. So they have manipulated the terms of the current election by prepackaging a candidate, throwing enormous sums of money at him before the game even begins, and smearing anyone who stands in their way. The issues aren't really healthcare and taxes. They can't win on issues people should logically care about. Instead, they have manipulated the argument so that it is about character.  Ingeniously, they paint a mostly normal person as very abnormal.

Consider the disturbing anti-democracy of this campaign. Both candidates are scions of established political families. Both started with money, more than any two candidates before them, not just in raw numbers but proportional to population and inflation. Both blew out opponents from the sheer mass of money in their war chests. Neither candidate has given a press conference and answered questions from the press in months -- no wonder many in the press corps make things up, or pounce on trivialities and spin them into life, regardless of the harm this spinning causes.

Of the two, Governor Bush has been worse, because he has only six years of public service in his time on earth, and that in the relatively low-maintenance job of governor of a weak-governor state. His main qualification, apart from what we are assured is a vital cheerleading personality (though something else, more churlish, inarticulate, reckless, and vulgar has often been on display).

Gore scolded and hectored Bradley out of the Democratic race, but Bush did something far worse to John McCain -- questioned his patriotism, questioned his commitment to women's health, questioned his commitment to veterans, of all things. He did not prevent Christian supporters from broadcasting anti-Semitic hate messages about McCain's campaign manager. We are to believe he is the great uniter, the great bipartisan -- but he has never exerted control over his own team's excesses. He can guide our nation, but he can't control his own people?

We are to believe he is the great conserver of public funds -- but government in Texas grew under his control in raw terms. Whereas Al Gore's work with governmental kaizen (continuous improvement) achieved many visible improvements in the efficiency and expense and customer-friendliness of government "bureaucracy." Bush, not Gore, is the candidate of big spending and big government -- but that concept violates sacred assumptions, and is not believed.

Throughout the election, Bush has flat out lied about key events in Texas government, like taking credit for a "health care bill of rights" that he supposedly supported -- but in fact vetoed. The awful irony (see sidebar) is that the Bush campaign, starting a year ago, set out to destroy Al Gore's reputations, connecting him to minor peculiarities about meaningless things, like dog medicine and Love Story, while Bush himself consistently lies about big things.

Why does a candidate claiming to be a great leader, a fiscal conservative, and a natural uniter need to spend $250 million to be elected president? In fact, doesn’t this figure powerfully undermine the possibility that he is any of those things?

Who is this "big power nexus" behind Bush? It's more than the Republican Party, though it is using the Republican Party as one of its bases (others being the national campaign press corps and right wing religious groups). It isn’t conservatives of good will, because the emphasis isn’t on issues at all, but on character. Behind this smokescreen of issuelessness, however, there are these meta-issues:

• the power to manipulate people's opinions via mass media expenditure;
• the right to keep the right people in power, and to force the wrong people out, by whatever means necessary -- rigging elections, fomenting scandals; and hounding enemies with disloyal opposition to the point of impeachment.

George Bush's problem is not that he is a fumble-mouth. It is that he is owned by and beholden to the powers that are massed behind him to provide money and guidance.

I believe George Bush will eventually be exposed as the most cynical major politician since Richard Nixon, his mentor Dick Cheney's mentor.

In such a dismal situation, one wants to look to the candidacy of Ralph Nader for hope. Nader is an authentic American hero, contributing more to our way of life over a lifetime of service than John McCain even. But his candidacy is marred by the desire of his supporters to be mere spoilers in the fray -- or worse, create a dysfunctional gridlock between a Democratic Congress and a Republican presidency (can you say impeachment revenge?) that the Green Party can profit from. This is defensible if your goal is the creation of a true multi-party system, but less defensible is your goal is to trash the U.S. government for a four-year period in order to score political gains for your party.

Why should we imagine, just because he was able to put together a deal to work with Texas's long-time Democratic Lieutenant Governor, that he can sway the hearts and minds of Congressional Democrats at the national level? More likely, say the Greens, Democrats will eat him alive.

Option to voting for Bush: Wait four years. Give Gore a chance to succeed or fail. With the media, big money and a disloyal opposition combining against him, he will either prove himself to be a president of the very first order or, more likely, he will fail, and a more seasoned and more mature Bush can run in 2004 and win.

He will still be around. He will still be charming. The big powers know they can count on him. He might even be a fair president at that point, as his father was.

That won’t solve the long term problem of a structural failure in the politics of the world's most important democracy. But it gets us through this dark political night, and creates breathing room for the future.

Talk about the lesser of two evils.

---

 

A quiz about presidential character and truth-telling.

Which candidate:

1. Spread the word that challenger John McCain was mentally unhinged from his years in the Hanoi Hilton?

2. Put out ads claiming that John McCain was soft on breast cancer research?

3. Chose to appear at Bob Jones University but not with Log Cabin Republicans, while maintaining he was "a uniter, not a divider?"

4. Castigated overnight guests at the White House when he did the exact same thing with his own donors at the governor's residence in Austin?

5. Claimed he would not "go negative" but would restore "decency and dignity" to the White House, meanwhile spreading lies about his opponent's character?

6. Sat out his last year in the Texas Air National Guard, yet claims to have served as honorably as his opponent, who served in Vietnam, although he is unable to present a single witness to his participation in the program? (I am not sure of the actual truth of this assertion, but Bush has been unable to produce a single witness who remembers him serving in Alabama. Evidence strongly suggests he simply went home -- which he might conceivably do as president, if he becomes bored, or someone implies something in his heart is dark.)

7. Confronted with the numbers about his own program in debate, blamed his opponent's "fuzzy math," not his program's details?

8. Claims his opponent "has no credibility on campaign finance reform" despite the fact that he himself has raised twice as much money as his opponent, relied even more heavily on soft money from his political party, and been guilty of the exact same kind of fundraising excesses?

9. Claims he does not set out to criticize his opponent's honesty, but merely answers questions he is asked at rallies -- when this discernibly untrue?

10. Promised a campaign of issues, then cleverly conducted a campaign of smears, character assassination, misconstruances and outright lies -- all in the name of "character"?