Obama Surrenders on Settlements
By Ian Williams, March 1, 2011 Foreign Policy in Focus
The recent U.S. veto of a UN Security Council resolution denouncing Israel's settlement policy is a tragicomic way for the Obama administration to abandon its claim to global leadership. But that is what Ambassador Susan Rice’s “nay” vote on February 18 signifies. The battle for a rational foreign policy in Washington has been over for some time. This veto represents surrender.
In George W. Bush’s days, such a veto would have been much less fraught. No one would have expected any better from that administration. And the erosion of U.S. economic, military, and diplomatic leverage, although underway, had not been made manifest. In those days, the United States did not pretend to care what the rest of the world thought, and there was even less that anyone else could do about it.
How things have changed! The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan might not represent defeat but they are Pyrrhic victories at best, with huge military, financial, and political costs. At the same time, the self-inflicted financial disaster has certainly dulled the luster of the U.S. economic model as the U.S. global position is crumbling BRIC by BRIC.
Across the Middle East, popular uprisings are removing the kleptocrats whose compliance with U.S. policy could be bought. They are also empowering a citizenry whose visceral reaction to U.S. support of Israel is on a par with African reaction to U.S. backing of South Africa’s former Apartheid regime. Indeed, the ouster of Mubarak removed one of the main U.S. levers on the Palestinians. Although Obama did not go to the aid of his ally, his hesitation, influenced by pro-Israeli interests, hardly garnered much street credibility in the region.
This veto also dramatically overturns the pledges that Obama made in his Cairo and Istanbul speeches about a renewed relationship with the Arabs and Muslims in the region. It not only abandons the Palestinians, it also abandons those Israelis who had been fighting for a peace settlement and the growing number of American Jews who have been combating Likudnik belligerence.
U.S. and Israel Isolated
The United States defied no fewer than 130 nations who had sponsored the resolution. Those voting for it included France, India, Germany, Brazil, the United Kingdom, and even Colombia. Given its desperate attempts to avert the resolution, the administration cannot claim ignorance of the significance of the vote or, indeed, the consequences of the veto.
The force with which UN Ambassador Rice attacked the Israeli settlement policy in her explanation of the U.S. vote was perhaps designed to mitigate the international effect of the veto. But it did nothing for U.S. standing, since it simply highlighted the surrender to Netanyahu, who ignored Rice’s stern admonitory statement with the same insouciance that he has brushed off Obama’s pleas. For U.S. friends and allies, the veto sent a strong message that Washington would ignore their wishes and interests when tweaked by a powerful domestic lobby – and that U.S. concern for democracy and international law does not extend to itself or Israel.
The veto also reveals how much the Obama administration's Middle Eastern policy reflects the influence of the former Clinton administration. At that time, the United States shifted from considering settlements “illegal” to labeling them “unhelpful.” Also under Clinton, the United States abandoned support of international law to state that the way forward for Israeli-Palestinian peace must be by “bilateral negotiations.” After such negotiations in Oslo, Israel achieved the normalization of relations with much of the Arab, Islamic, and non-aligned world, and built settlements regardless. Palestinians gave up tangible international diplomatic leverage in return for an interminable process, a road map folded into a Mobius strip that circled around endlessly.
With most Palestinians realizing the inefficacy of armed resistance, the PLO began to build its last line of defense: international law. The Palestinian mission to the UN emphasized the corpus of UN decisions and international conventions against the occupation and the settlements. The parties to the Fourth Geneva convention, the International Court of Justice, the UN General Assembly, all venues where the United States had no veto, reaffirmed the Palestinian position.
Israel was deeply concerned by such moves. That is why, prodded by Israel, the Clinton administration composed the mantra now being recited by Obama’s team, that in effect, international law could and should be disregarded, and the Palestinians should cut a deal. Palestinian leaders have consistently pretended that the United States was an honest broker, even as Washington kept strong-arming them into more and more concessions. Between the veto and the WikiLeaks revelations, they can no longer pretend that this is so.
Wider Consequences
In the wake of the UN vote, the Palestinians will likely mount a more vigorous campaign for world public opinion, which will throw Washington’s subservience to Israeli interests into greater relief. At the UN, speaker after speaker, even the British, looked forward to welcoming Palestine as a member state by this September. In a polite way, U.S. allies were throwing down the gauntlet for another confrontation with Washington.
Israel, meanwhile, finds itself in a more fragile position. If it rejects the new Palestinian state, it will be much more vulnerable to calls for international sanctions, boycotts, and divestments. Significantly, the EU is a much more significant trading partner than the United States, and European publics are significantly more inclined to such measures. So, European politicians will find themselves squeezed between pressure from the public to further isolate Israel and pressure from the United States to back off. After the flotilla conflict with Turkey, Israel has lost whatever friends it has in the Muslim world. There is little prospect of Arab forces marching on Tel Aviv, but clearly the peace is about to get even colder, with less cooperation on policing the border between Gaza and Egypt and even more pressure for a regional nuclear free zone.
The Palestinians can, and very likely will, take up other options to isolate the United States and Israel. It could reconvene the meeting of signatories to the Geneva Convention, or more tellingly, it could reconvene the Emergency General Assembly under the Uniting for Peace resolution that the United States moved to bypass the Soviet veto during the Korean War. That session is currently adjourned, but it would once again emphasize the U.S. isolation.
The more the United States is isolated in its unqualified defense of Israel, the less amenable governments in the region will be to cooperation with Washington, except when it clearly meets their own interests. The future of U.S. military bases in the region – in Bahrain, Iraq, Kuwait – will for instance become more tenuous. On a wider level, Obama has lost much of the ground for public diplomacy he had seized when he replaced George W. Bush.
The veto – combined with the tepid and belated response to Egypt, Tunisia, and Bahrain – has also complicated U.S. response to the emerging civil war in Libya. Gaddafi’s regional unpopularity would likely ensure some local cooperation in enforcing a no-fly zone, for instance. But even if it went ahead, it would leave the world with the big question: why does the United States fly to stop hundreds of Libyans being killed from the air, but supplies the planes, drones, bombs, and shells for Israel to kill a thousand Palestinians? Regional public opinion, now politically important, is as likely to assume that U.S. sorties against Libya were flown on behalf of Israel as much as to support Libyan protestors.
Showing posts with label Bill Clinton. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Bill Clinton. Show all posts
Tuesday, March 01, 2011
Thursday, February 03, 2011
Pray for Democracy - But Not Just Yet...
Fear of the Muslim Brotherhood Trumps Western Wishes for Democracy in Egypt
By Ian Williams, February 3, 2011 FPIF
Muslim Brotherhood(Pictured: The Muslim Brotherhood.)
It might suit such pundits as Blair, Bolton and Netanyahu to pretend that Egyptians are too uneducated and ignorant to be trusted with democracy, but I would put my money on the political literacy of the Egyptians en masse over Americans any day.
One cannot help but suspect that what they mean by “ignorant” is that they support the Palestinians. That is not to say that they necessarily want to rush to war, but certainly the unholy tradeoffs in enforcing the blockade on Gaza are deeply unpopular. The rising was certainly inspired by domestic concerns, economic and democratic, but the delegitimizing effect of pro-Israeli support for the regime should not be underestimated, not least inside the Army, which after all has fought Israel repeatedly.
That is not to say a future regime would declare war or rip up Camp David. Rather it would probably emulate Turkey, and maintain polite but chilly relations with Israel. Cairo will be less biddable, whether from Israel or the US. While Bolton, a deep harborer of grudges, reviles Mohamed El Baradei, it is worth remembering that the present government, along with him, and indeed putative rival Amr Al-Moussa, are all on the record as wanting Israel to sign the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty.
Who can oppose a call for democracy? Well, John Bolton, Peres and Netanyahu can, not to mention Tony Blair, who described Mubarak as “immensely courageous, and a force for good,” even as his mercenary thugs brought blood and mayhem to the streets of Cairo. And of course the time-expired President of Palestine, Mohamed Abbas.
The outright support of Netanyahu and his friends for the alleged stability of the Mubarak regime certainly tempers the enthusiasm of many others in the chattering classes in the US, for toppling the regime in Cairo, including the Obama administration. Ironically their various pronouncements in favor of Mubarak and his anointed deputy Omar Suleiman are very effective stakes through the heart of the regime.
However, Netanyahu, Peres and Blair are following a long tradition of American policy towards Egypt that has for long time been effectively amoral, with no ethical dimension at all. It did not care what happened to Egyptians as long their government did what it was told.
Consistently, from Sandy Berger and Clinton and even before, democracy has been sidelined as a US policy in the Arab world. Originally, any Arab regime that did not threaten Israel had a free pass for torture and repression, but after 9-11, Muslims, Arabs, terrorists all became blurred in the popular mind – and even in Washington policy-making circles.
So for Egypt, democracy would all be fine, if there weren’t a strong chance that the Muslim Brothers would be elected and at least share power. People who are quite happy to respect Catholic dominated Christian Democrats across Europe, rabbi-led parties in Israel, and dare one add, Evangelical dominated Republicans in the US, confess to frissons of fear at the thought that the Muslim Brotherhood will play a large part in a new reformed Egyptian administration.
Just as everybody knows that every Catholic is an inquisitor waiting with a box of matches next to the stake, viscerally, Americans know every Muslim is a terrorist. Fortunately, the images of the peaceful, articulate and passionate demonstrators in Tahrir Square belied that.
It is an ironic comment on consistently failed US policy that if Washington had not stopped the funding for the Aswan Dam under Nasser, the total of $35 billion in military aid, which began as a bribe to wean Cairo away from the Soviets, might have been unnecessary, let alone if the US had maintained its principles. Remember, back in 1956, the US had threatened to crash the currencies of its two biggest allies, Britain and France, and Israel if the three conspirators did not pull out from the Sinai they had just occupied.
Of course the US could withhold aid to Egypt if it elected a new government that was, shall we say, less amenable to Israeli wishes. However, since most of this money is immediately recycled to American weapons makers and does not impinge on ordinary citizens, it is hardly a potent threat to the nation. But if Obama is serious about democratization, he could mention the possibility of stopping the dollars flowing to the Egyptian high command who along with Mubarak, are the major beneficiaries of this largesse.
In fact, there is some doubt whether the bulk of the Army would actually obey orders to move against the demonstrators. Its popular legitimacy derives from its wars against invaders, which is somewhat challenged when the President is endorsed by those who most Egyptians, military and civilian see as the enemy. Perhaps the most potent images which demoralized the police and security forces and deprived them and the regime of legitimacy were the water cannons deployed against praying demonstrators.
The absence of the uniformed security forces and indeed their visible reluctance to stand their ground against demonstrators suggests that demoralization has already set in, while the unleashing of paid thugs that we have seen is reminiscent of the last days of the Indonesians in East Timor, Ceausescu in Romania and other crumbling regimes.
Indeed Mubarak might want to check over the reports of the downfall of the Romanian dictator, where it was the army that decided, under cover of popular protest, the best way to calm things down was to put him in front of kangaroo court and shoot him.
Obama cannot claim non-interference. Washington’s financial, military and diplomatic support for Mubarak are already an intervention. A clear signal that it was all ending could motivate the armed forces leaders to seek a Mubarak-free accommodation with the opposition and ensure an orderly transition to democracy.
By Ian Williams, February 3, 2011 FPIF
Muslim Brotherhood(Pictured: The Muslim Brotherhood.)
It might suit such pundits as Blair, Bolton and Netanyahu to pretend that Egyptians are too uneducated and ignorant to be trusted with democracy, but I would put my money on the political literacy of the Egyptians en masse over Americans any day.
One cannot help but suspect that what they mean by “ignorant” is that they support the Palestinians. That is not to say that they necessarily want to rush to war, but certainly the unholy tradeoffs in enforcing the blockade on Gaza are deeply unpopular. The rising was certainly inspired by domestic concerns, economic and democratic, but the delegitimizing effect of pro-Israeli support for the regime should not be underestimated, not least inside the Army, which after all has fought Israel repeatedly.
That is not to say a future regime would declare war or rip up Camp David. Rather it would probably emulate Turkey, and maintain polite but chilly relations with Israel. Cairo will be less biddable, whether from Israel or the US. While Bolton, a deep harborer of grudges, reviles Mohamed El Baradei, it is worth remembering that the present government, along with him, and indeed putative rival Amr Al-Moussa, are all on the record as wanting Israel to sign the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty.
Who can oppose a call for democracy? Well, John Bolton, Peres and Netanyahu can, not to mention Tony Blair, who described Mubarak as “immensely courageous, and a force for good,” even as his mercenary thugs brought blood and mayhem to the streets of Cairo. And of course the time-expired President of Palestine, Mohamed Abbas.
The outright support of Netanyahu and his friends for the alleged stability of the Mubarak regime certainly tempers the enthusiasm of many others in the chattering classes in the US, for toppling the regime in Cairo, including the Obama administration. Ironically their various pronouncements in favor of Mubarak and his anointed deputy Omar Suleiman are very effective stakes through the heart of the regime.
However, Netanyahu, Peres and Blair are following a long tradition of American policy towards Egypt that has for long time been effectively amoral, with no ethical dimension at all. It did not care what happened to Egyptians as long their government did what it was told.
Consistently, from Sandy Berger and Clinton and even before, democracy has been sidelined as a US policy in the Arab world. Originally, any Arab regime that did not threaten Israel had a free pass for torture and repression, but after 9-11, Muslims, Arabs, terrorists all became blurred in the popular mind – and even in Washington policy-making circles.
So for Egypt, democracy would all be fine, if there weren’t a strong chance that the Muslim Brothers would be elected and at least share power. People who are quite happy to respect Catholic dominated Christian Democrats across Europe, rabbi-led parties in Israel, and dare one add, Evangelical dominated Republicans in the US, confess to frissons of fear at the thought that the Muslim Brotherhood will play a large part in a new reformed Egyptian administration.
Just as everybody knows that every Catholic is an inquisitor waiting with a box of matches next to the stake, viscerally, Americans know every Muslim is a terrorist. Fortunately, the images of the peaceful, articulate and passionate demonstrators in Tahrir Square belied that.
It is an ironic comment on consistently failed US policy that if Washington had not stopped the funding for the Aswan Dam under Nasser, the total of $35 billion in military aid, which began as a bribe to wean Cairo away from the Soviets, might have been unnecessary, let alone if the US had maintained its principles. Remember, back in 1956, the US had threatened to crash the currencies of its two biggest allies, Britain and France, and Israel if the three conspirators did not pull out from the Sinai they had just occupied.
Of course the US could withhold aid to Egypt if it elected a new government that was, shall we say, less amenable to Israeli wishes. However, since most of this money is immediately recycled to American weapons makers and does not impinge on ordinary citizens, it is hardly a potent threat to the nation. But if Obama is serious about democratization, he could mention the possibility of stopping the dollars flowing to the Egyptian high command who along with Mubarak, are the major beneficiaries of this largesse.
In fact, there is some doubt whether the bulk of the Army would actually obey orders to move against the demonstrators. Its popular legitimacy derives from its wars against invaders, which is somewhat challenged when the President is endorsed by those who most Egyptians, military and civilian see as the enemy. Perhaps the most potent images which demoralized the police and security forces and deprived them and the regime of legitimacy were the water cannons deployed against praying demonstrators.
The absence of the uniformed security forces and indeed their visible reluctance to stand their ground against demonstrators suggests that demoralization has already set in, while the unleashing of paid thugs that we have seen is reminiscent of the last days of the Indonesians in East Timor, Ceausescu in Romania and other crumbling regimes.
Indeed Mubarak might want to check over the reports of the downfall of the Romanian dictator, where it was the army that decided, under cover of popular protest, the best way to calm things down was to put him in front of kangaroo court and shoot him.
Obama cannot claim non-interference. Washington’s financial, military and diplomatic support for Mubarak are already an intervention. A clear signal that it was all ending could motivate the armed forces leaders to seek a Mubarak-free accommodation with the opposition and ensure an orderly transition to democracy.
Tuesday, February 19, 2008
Thursday, December 13, 2007
Ask not for whom the polls bill, they bill for you
Ask not for whom the polls bill, they bill for you
Tribune 14 December 2007
Democracy is an imperfect tool. As Winston Churchill said, it’s the worst possible system except for all the others and so it needs sharpening regularly to keep its edge. However, it needs constant work not least since it often seems that every improvement brings new and unforeseen problems.
In the US, the attempt to rescue party nominations from the smoke-and-bribery filled rooms of Tammany Hall led to the primary elections, where the leading Democratic contenders are currently running bills of around $100 million each just to be the candidates. It’s not in the constitution, but you could almost dispense with the formality of elections and declare the candidate with the biggest war-chest the winner.
The Supreme Court adds its own wacko embellishment to this emerging principle of one dollar one vote by rulings that invoke the first amendment right of free speech to stop curbs on money in campaigns. The poor man has an equal right to own newspapers as the rich, just as Murdoch family members have the right to sleep wrapped in their newspapers under a Manhattan flyover.
This election cycle is even worse. More and more states moved their primaries forward to the beginning of 2008, which means that active campaigning and spending began a year ago and has at least six months more to go before the parties’ candidates are chosen. Most of this money goes on television advertising, which at least Britain is spared.
The results of the system are apparent – and undemocratic. Under Blair’s mentor, Bill Clinton, a $100,000 in campaign contributions bought a night in the White House, half a million bought a WTO case against Caribbean banana preferences in the EU, or tightening sanctions on Cuba. Those donations showed clear cause and effect, but on a larger scale the fact that money comes from rich people and businesses explain why
Polls show popular support for universal healthcare, but the lobbyists for the big pharmaceutical companies and insurance companies and their campaign cheques ensure that almost fifty million Americans have no health insurance and all Americans pay the world’s highest prices for their drugs.
We can guarantee that whoever is elected as the Democratic candidate, or eventually the President, will be the beneficiary of several hundred million dollars in donations from rich individuals and corporations. Their policies will almost certainly reflect that, which is why the gap between rich and poor is widening and why ordinary working families under Bush have become more indebted and impoverished even as the economy has officially been booming.
In Britain, the entirely laudable attempt to extend the franchise for choosing the Labour Party leadership led to similar problems. Candidates had to raise their own money for canvassing and reaaching hundreds of thousands of members, and despite warnings from those who had seen what happened in the US, there was no system to oversee and reveal funding.
Enter Michael Levy, the vanguard of dodgy fundraisers, who made his debut financing Tony Blair’s leadership campaign. We now see where that led. In the name of removing the “undemocratic” influence of the unions that had actually founded the Labour Party, New Labour desperately sold itself to everyone from friends of Formula One Racing to friends of Ariel Sharon.
Being an entrist clique similar to Militant – but without the Trotskyist group’s grassroots appeal – New Labour felt no great need to tell the members of the party, or indeed the NEC, what it was up to. There have always been eccentric millionaires who have supported the Labour Party, and who have done so publicly. The minute money flows under the counter it is reasonable to assume that there is a quo being quidded. Even in the US, for all its faults, candidates must publish the list of donations.
Sadly, the infiltrators have drastically reduced the size of the Labour party electorate that potential leadership candidates have to address even if that does not seem to lessened their appetites for funny money. Those original members whom Michael Levy’s money helped win for Tony Blair, have left in droves, whether in protest or apathy when it became clear that their role in decision making was minimal. It is sad that Gordon Brown should now be carrying the can for decisions made by his predecessor, but it does give him the opportunity to put some serious distance from previous policies. Above all, if he wants to increase individual membership and ensure continued and increasing support from unions and their members, then he has to ensure that they have an effective voice in everything from the selection of candidates to the direction of policies.
The alternative is to follow through on the American road, and put a big “For Sale” sign up.
Tribune 14 December 2007
Democracy is an imperfect tool. As Winston Churchill said, it’s the worst possible system except for all the others and so it needs sharpening regularly to keep its edge. However, it needs constant work not least since it often seems that every improvement brings new and unforeseen problems.
In the US, the attempt to rescue party nominations from the smoke-and-bribery filled rooms of Tammany Hall led to the primary elections, where the leading Democratic contenders are currently running bills of around $100 million each just to be the candidates. It’s not in the constitution, but you could almost dispense with the formality of elections and declare the candidate with the biggest war-chest the winner.
The Supreme Court adds its own wacko embellishment to this emerging principle of one dollar one vote by rulings that invoke the first amendment right of free speech to stop curbs on money in campaigns. The poor man has an equal right to own newspapers as the rich, just as Murdoch family members have the right to sleep wrapped in their newspapers under a Manhattan flyover.
This election cycle is even worse. More and more states moved their primaries forward to the beginning of 2008, which means that active campaigning and spending began a year ago and has at least six months more to go before the parties’ candidates are chosen. Most of this money goes on television advertising, which at least Britain is spared.
The results of the system are apparent – and undemocratic. Under Blair’s mentor, Bill Clinton, a $100,000 in campaign contributions bought a night in the White House, half a million bought a WTO case against Caribbean banana preferences in the EU, or tightening sanctions on Cuba. Those donations showed clear cause and effect, but on a larger scale the fact that money comes from rich people and businesses explain why
Polls show popular support for universal healthcare, but the lobbyists for the big pharmaceutical companies and insurance companies and their campaign cheques ensure that almost fifty million Americans have no health insurance and all Americans pay the world’s highest prices for their drugs.
We can guarantee that whoever is elected as the Democratic candidate, or eventually the President, will be the beneficiary of several hundred million dollars in donations from rich individuals and corporations. Their policies will almost certainly reflect that, which is why the gap between rich and poor is widening and why ordinary working families under Bush have become more indebted and impoverished even as the economy has officially been booming.
In Britain, the entirely laudable attempt to extend the franchise for choosing the Labour Party leadership led to similar problems. Candidates had to raise their own money for canvassing and reaaching hundreds of thousands of members, and despite warnings from those who had seen what happened in the US, there was no system to oversee and reveal funding.
Enter Michael Levy, the vanguard of dodgy fundraisers, who made his debut financing Tony Blair’s leadership campaign. We now see where that led. In the name of removing the “undemocratic” influence of the unions that had actually founded the Labour Party, New Labour desperately sold itself to everyone from friends of Formula One Racing to friends of Ariel Sharon.
Being an entrist clique similar to Militant – but without the Trotskyist group’s grassroots appeal – New Labour felt no great need to tell the members of the party, or indeed the NEC, what it was up to. There have always been eccentric millionaires who have supported the Labour Party, and who have done so publicly. The minute money flows under the counter it is reasonable to assume that there is a quo being quidded. Even in the US, for all its faults, candidates must publish the list of donations.
Sadly, the infiltrators have drastically reduced the size of the Labour party electorate that potential leadership candidates have to address even if that does not seem to lessened their appetites for funny money. Those original members whom Michael Levy’s money helped win for Tony Blair, have left in droves, whether in protest or apathy when it became clear that their role in decision making was minimal. It is sad that Gordon Brown should now be carrying the can for decisions made by his predecessor, but it does give him the opportunity to put some serious distance from previous policies. Above all, if he wants to increase individual membership and ensure continued and increasing support from unions and their members, then he has to ensure that they have an effective voice in everything from the selection of candidates to the direction of policies.
The alternative is to follow through on the American road, and put a big “For Sale” sign up.
Thursday, December 06, 2007
Friday, August 31, 2007
Monday, April 02, 2007
Sublime Intervention!
In my latest Guardian Comment is Free,
I argue that some of the Leninoid anti-Interventionists would have opposed Royal Navy patrols agaisnt the slave trade two hundred years ago.
Feel free to join in the resulting scrum at http://tinyurl.com/35akth
I argue that some of the Leninoid anti-Interventionists would have opposed Royal Navy patrols agaisnt the slave trade two hundred years ago.
Feel free to join in the resulting scrum at http://tinyurl.com/35akth
Sunday, February 04, 2007
Biden, My Part in His Downfall
Latest Guardian "Comment is Free Post"
Of plagiarism and primaries
Joe Biden, former Neil Kinnock plagiarist, shows the full madness of American presidential primaries.
February 2, 2007 07:58 PM
The primary season has started early in the United States. Would-be candidates have been spotted "exploring" Iowa, getting in touch with their feigned inner folksiness - and ready for next year's caucus.
Joe Biden, one of the candidates, was laughed out the race almost two decades ago for plagiarizing a speech made by Neil Kinnock in the 1987 election campaign, during which I worked in the Labour Party leader's office writing speeches and articles. (To be fair, Neil always ended up composing his own speeches based on the input from the writers.)
They were heady times. Ben Elton the comedian used to come to the office after his nightly performances and we would work on jokes late into the night. Big Ben's booming rocked us in our seats every fifteen minutes as little Ben and I, exhausted, worked out quips for the campaign speeches.
But the speech Biden stole was no joke. Neil eloquently depicted what the 1945 Labour government had done for working people in Britain. Generations of Kinnocks had hacked away at the coal face in the South Wales collieries, but he was the first to get to university.
Joe Biden misappropriated the speech in every sense of the word. He had hacked his way through a private academy with a silver spoon. I felt a sense of justice watching him fail.
Now of course, he has appropriated another trait of Neil Kinnock - who tended to take the periods and full stops out of what we wrote. Biden missed a comma while discussing Barack Obama's presidential aspirations - he said Obama was "the first mainstream African-American who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy" - and walked into a manufactured firestorm over whether or not he had insulted other (presumably less bright and clean) black Americans.
Biden's problems illustrate what is wrong with the weird primary process. Wannabe presidential candidates have to be contortionists as they try to appear inoffensive to as many different constituencies as possible. For example, the US heavily subsidizes converting corn into ethanol - a process that actually consumes more energy than it produces. But the huge subsidies exist in part because the primaries begin in Iowa - the largest producer of ethanol in the country - and thus all candidates must sing the praises of the fuel right from the beginning of the campaign.
And a longer, wackier primary will cost a lot more. Estimates for merely entering the race range from $30m to $100m. And like Will Sutton - who robbed banks, because that's where the money is - almost all the candidates will be going to major lobbying groups to raise cash for their campaigns.
John Edwards supports ending the war in Iraq because he knows that's where the votes are. But in a speech to the Herzliya Institute in Israel, he near enough threatened to start a war with Iran instead, bellicosely saying that no option should be left off the table in dealing with Tehran. Needless to say, pro-Israeli money also plays a big role in campaigns. And who in Florida is going to say it is time to stop pandering to the anti-Castro crazies and drop the embargo on Cuba?
It's not just the Democrats who bend themselves into the political equivalent of Moebius strip. John McCain has been passing as an honourable man, a centrist Republican who was once considered as a potential for vice presidentt on a Democratic ticket. But to win the Republican primaries, he is now transforming himself, or revealing himself - the jury is out on which it is - as a ferocious conservative hack.
The primary system, where candidates mutually vivisect their own party colleagues for a year and then expect voters to turn out in a general election to support exhausted and thoroughly slimed candidates, is a uniquely American process. Which may go a long way to explaining why so few Americans vote in the end.
This entry was tagged with the following keywords: JoeBiden, HillaryClinton, JohnEdwards, JohnMcCain, NeilKinnock, BenElton, AmericanElections
Of plagiarism and primaries
Joe Biden, former Neil Kinnock plagiarist, shows the full madness of American presidential primaries.
February 2, 2007 07:58 PM
The primary season has started early in the United States. Would-be candidates have been spotted "exploring" Iowa, getting in touch with their feigned inner folksiness - and ready for next year's caucus.
Joe Biden, one of the candidates, was laughed out the race almost two decades ago for plagiarizing a speech made by Neil Kinnock in the 1987 election campaign, during which I worked in the Labour Party leader's office writing speeches and articles. (To be fair, Neil always ended up composing his own speeches based on the input from the writers.)
They were heady times. Ben Elton the comedian used to come to the office after his nightly performances and we would work on jokes late into the night. Big Ben's booming rocked us in our seats every fifteen minutes as little Ben and I, exhausted, worked out quips for the campaign speeches.
But the speech Biden stole was no joke. Neil eloquently depicted what the 1945 Labour government had done for working people in Britain. Generations of Kinnocks had hacked away at the coal face in the South Wales collieries, but he was the first to get to university.
Joe Biden misappropriated the speech in every sense of the word. He had hacked his way through a private academy with a silver spoon. I felt a sense of justice watching him fail.
Now of course, he has appropriated another trait of Neil Kinnock - who tended to take the periods and full stops out of what we wrote. Biden missed a comma while discussing Barack Obama's presidential aspirations - he said Obama was "the first mainstream African-American who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy" - and walked into a manufactured firestorm over whether or not he had insulted other (presumably less bright and clean) black Americans.
Biden's problems illustrate what is wrong with the weird primary process. Wannabe presidential candidates have to be contortionists as they try to appear inoffensive to as many different constituencies as possible. For example, the US heavily subsidizes converting corn into ethanol - a process that actually consumes more energy than it produces. But the huge subsidies exist in part because the primaries begin in Iowa - the largest producer of ethanol in the country - and thus all candidates must sing the praises of the fuel right from the beginning of the campaign.
And a longer, wackier primary will cost a lot more. Estimates for merely entering the race range from $30m to $100m. And like Will Sutton - who robbed banks, because that's where the money is - almost all the candidates will be going to major lobbying groups to raise cash for their campaigns.
John Edwards supports ending the war in Iraq because he knows that's where the votes are. But in a speech to the Herzliya Institute in Israel, he near enough threatened to start a war with Iran instead, bellicosely saying that no option should be left off the table in dealing with Tehran. Needless to say, pro-Israeli money also plays a big role in campaigns. And who in Florida is going to say it is time to stop pandering to the anti-Castro crazies and drop the embargo on Cuba?
It's not just the Democrats who bend themselves into the political equivalent of Moebius strip. John McCain has been passing as an honourable man, a centrist Republican who was once considered as a potential for vice presidentt on a Democratic ticket. But to win the Republican primaries, he is now transforming himself, or revealing himself - the jury is out on which it is - as a ferocious conservative hack.
The primary system, where candidates mutually vivisect their own party colleagues for a year and then expect voters to turn out in a general election to support exhausted and thoroughly slimed candidates, is a uniquely American process. Which may go a long way to explaining why so few Americans vote in the end.
This entry was tagged with the following keywords: JoeBiden, HillaryClinton, JohnEdwards, JohnMcCain, NeilKinnock, BenElton, AmericanElections
Friday, February 02, 2007
Primary Causes
This is my latest in the Washington Spectator, a magazine well worth subscribing to
Click here The Washington Spectator
PRIMARY ELECTIONS
"Pillar of Democracy" May Be Worse Than Useless
By Ian Williams | 02/01/2007
n recent elections, reform-minded Americans have had their usual doubts about the manifestly undemocratic and clunky Electoral College, and a completely new set of deep doubts have arisen about how accurately the electronic voting systems have recorded the wishes of voters. There has also been some justifiable concern about how partisan election officials have purged the voter rolls. Despite the various concerns, and attempts to address them, the use of primary elections to choose party candidates has, surprisingly, escaped critical examination. People discuss how to make the primaries more efficient, more representative. But the real question should be, why are they held at all?
They are unique to the United States, which is even more anomalous, considering its national reputation, maybe not always deserved, for keeping government out of civic affairs. No other democratic country with embedded electoral traditions allows a state or federal government to determine how political parties choose their candidates or to run elections for them. Although it was only in the 1970s that primaries supplanted party conventions as the means of choosing presidential candidates, familiarity has bred undeserved contentment with the process. Primaries have been part of the U.S. electoral system for a century, and have thus acquired a patina of constitutional respectability, even though the Founding Fathers wisely never mentioned them, nor indeed political parties, for which George Washington and others had a profound distrust. The change has not necessarily advanced democracy, let alone the Democrats.
AN ACCELERATED SCHEDULE—Under discussion now is a move by several state governments to hold their primaries earlier in the year. Nevada is seeking to hold a primary for Democrats before the traditional lead-off polling in New Hampshire, and South Carolina will stage its primary right afterwards. The number of states that participate in Super Tuesday on February 5 could leap next year from six to fourteen, with powerhouses like California, Florida, Illinois and New Jersey joining in. Less than a month after the Iowa caucuses, the nominations could already be decided on both sides.
Since anything that puts an end to the opportunity for auto-evisceration that is a presidential primary has to be a good thing, a concentrated early primary may be welcome news. It would allow a rapid nomination and would give the winning candidate time to brush off some of the mud slung before the general election.
On the other hand, it means that prospective candidates to be the presidential nominee are already on the hoof a year in advance. Already 19 candidates (give or take Newt Gingrich) have declared or are "exploring" a run for president. The very weekend that Hillary Clinton announced that she was "in to win," New Mexico governor Bill Richardson pitched himself as a "uniter, a healer," and Kansas senator Sam Brownback posed as a "full-scale Ronald Reagan conservative." They are all spending freely and are prepared to keep on sprinkling greenbacks for the next year. And after a year, they will have to raise—and spend—even larger sums of money in a very short time to compete in the official primary election circuit.
So the other effect of the concentrated primaries is that the financial barrier for candidates is higher than ever. In general, only the rich need apply—or perhaps even more pernicious, those who are backed by the rich, since as we know, there are the occasional eccentric progressive billionaires.
In fact, instead of tinkering with the details, we might well reconsider the whole tedious and retrogressive machinery of the primaries, perverse both in principle and in practice. Having begun as a means of freeing politics from the smoke-filled rooms of the party machines, they have become the method by which hugely expensive rubber-chicken-filled banqueting rooms dominate politics. It is through the primaries that big money gets most leverage in the political process. A candidate as an individual rather than a party organization has to raise huge amounts of money for a primary election.
The grueling marathon is more a test of who can raise the most campaign cash than who can get the most votes. You may remember that Bill Clinton was not the front-runner early on in 1992. He lost the New Hampshire primary, but he carried on getting money when Paul Tsongas's political base ran out of funds and he had to drop out.
It's not a pretty picture. The primaries are an inverted Darwinian struggle to see which candidate has the least scruples about digging up the most dirt on his rivals, and can spend the most money to broadcast the slurs. Let us remember that the GOP picked up the Willy Horton slur from the Democratic primaries. At the end of this intra-party struggle, the exhausted victor is supposed to rally all the people who have been campaigning against him or her for a year to go out and canvass for the victor in the general election.
The need for money distorts the political campaigns and thus the platforms of the candidates. As a general rule, someone who wants to make the rich less so begins with a considerable handicap in the primaries. Candidates skew their policies towards the checkbooks as much as the voters. Their positions on health care, the Middle East, gun reform, transportation, Cuba, abortion and many other significant issues will be triangulated in a complex political calculus to garner maximum contributions as well as votes.
That is not to say that the voters are without power. Primary voters tend to be self-selected, more committed and ideological than the general electorate. The pernicious effects of that were clear with Bush senior, Bob Dole, and now John McCain, who as Republicans have all had to appear far more rigidly conservative in their positions than their records would otherwise suggest. The good news is that this tends to make them unelectable. The exception to this that has proven the rule is George W. Bush, who managed to sail under false centrist colors because the Christian right knew where his deeply conservative heart really was.
However, even on the Democratic side, the contortions of policy lead to a well-deserved public mistrust of politicians, who tailor their messages to different blocs of voters and check-writers. In January, John Edwards spoke to a conference in Israel, where he implied that he supported war with Iran and talked about keeping "All options on the table," presumably with potential donors in mind, while at the same time he was busily disavowing the war in Iraq for voters. Any candidate who wants to campaign for a single payer health-care system, popular with Democratic voters, can not only kiss goodbye any health insurance company donations but will have to accept that his rivals will clean up from them in return for silence or obfuscation on the issue.
VOTERS' RIGHTS—At present, in most states primary-election voters will have already declared their party allegiances when they come to the polls. To an outsider, this makes a mockery of the secret ballot, since voters' preferences are signaled on the public record for anyone to see. In an ideal world, of course, no harm would come to anyone for voting the wrong way . . . but has anyone noticed anything especially idealistic about the current GOP?
Even accepting that a tick on a registration form gives membership privileges to closed primary voters, there can be few excuses for the mockery of the democratic process that is the "open primary," which lets supporters of the opposing party muscle in and pick your party's candidate. In more than twenty states, you can sabotage the opposition in this way in the privacy of the polling booth. Whatever the views of Georgia Congresswoman Cynthia McKinney, it is clear that most Democrats in her district wanted her to represent them; but McKinney has twice been unseated by a combination of out-of-state money and Republican crossover votes in an open primary, in between winning a general election handsomely.
In a free society, as long as no criminal activity takes place within independent associations like parties, government should not interfere with how they order their affairs. Why shouldn't Democrats keep Republicans, or indeed professed Independents, from interfering in their internal affairs, one of the most important of which is surely their choice of whom to represent them in election campaigns?
In fact, an American political party has little or no choice about its candidates. It is carpetbagger heaven out there. Anyone with a bankroll can apply. New York's billionaire mayor Mike Bloomberg, a registered Democrat for many years, decided to run on the Republican ticket simply because it was cheaper and easier to buy the nomination.
Supporters of open primaries argue that they "increase voter participation," but there is little evidence of this. Indeed, since those who make this argument often spend so much time filtering the electoral rolls for alleged felons, there is room to doubt their sincerity.
In any case, this imaginary benefit is nullified by a certain reality: that the primaries turn voters into consumers of the policies of any personality with enough cash to run and to advertise themselves with all the sincerity and political content of a new toothpaste. The need to win an unknown and amorphous mass of voters has led to massive expenditures on television advertising, which in turn leads to huge demands for cash and all the consequences. That expenditure spills over into the general election, where at least public financing takes on some of the strain.
In many countries, parties are not allowed to abuse the airwaves in this way. Britain, for example, has very strict limits on spending by candidates. The Supreme Court's laughable invocation of the First Amendment to stop restrictions on spending is reminiscent of Anatole France's comment that "The law in its wisdom allows both the rich and the poor to sleep under the bridges over the Seine."
When campaign donations have such a disproportionate effect on policies, primaries deprive party supporters, or members as they are misnamed, of any real input into candidate or party platforms. In other democratic countries, ordinary party members can usually propose policies, choose—and lose—the leadership of their organizations. The Democratic primaries have been turning the party more and more into a P.O. box for corporate donations and reducing Democratic supporters to voting fodder, which is exactly where Tammany Hall had them before reformers instituted primaries, which were invented to break its power.
MUTING OPPOSITION—The system also has an effect on the political process, serving to make effective opposition much more difficult. In a parliamentary system, shortly after an election the defeated party chooses either to give its leader another chance, or picks someone new to carry the standard, so there is an acknowledged leader of the opposition. With the primaries and the attenuated party system, Democrats in opposition can wallow leaderless for the three years of a presidential term and then tear themselves apart in bitterly contested primaries.
This rudderlessness could afflict Republicans as well as Democrats, but this tends not to be. The Democratic Party still has the vestiges of a grass-roots organization, representing vociferous interest groups. The modern GOP is much more Bolshevik in its ideology and organization. When Karl Rove issues orders, Republican operatives all over the country tend to move in concert. The Democrats have no equivalent commissar, and even if they did, no one would take too much notice.
ALTERNATIVES AND THINGS TO AVOID—Of course, there may be worse things than primaries. In many other countries, where there is proportional representation party bosses dictate who gets on the party list, and in Britain the ever-eager-to-learn Tony Blair has been busily introducing candidate selections that exclude anyone who is insufficiently supportive of his style of leadership. Indeed, he has cemented his control by repelling half the Labour Party's membership since he took office.
As with the introduction of primaries themselves, there are often unintended consequences. It would be foolish to rush in with any kind of panacea when it comes to change, but we should surely be thinking about alternatives. For example:
• Hold the party convention early. In fact, hold it immediately after an unsuccessful presidential election, to choose the leadership and policies for the time in opposition and to give a candidate a good three years to build a reputation with the electorate.
• Build an actual party. There are over sixty million registered Democrats. If they were to join up as real party members, even paying a nominal subscription fee of $10 a year, not only could they fund elections without another corporate check, they would have some serious input in the matter of choosing candidates. A participation fee, no matter how nominal, would be a better test of party loyalty than just ticking a box when registering to vote.
• Use new technology to communicate. At one time, it could be argued that only government had the resources to canvass the opinions of party supporters. Apart from the very poor job that government has been doing in conducting elections recently, the technology and the need are now there for parties to seize control back from the state. With the growth of the Internet, as organizations like MoveOn.org have shown, party activities and fundraising can be much more democratically organized, cutting out expensive and sleazy TV advertising campaigns and putting the voter back in control of policy decisions and candidate choice.
• Consider new voting systems. In many other democracies, first-past-the-post elections have been abandoned for transferable voting systems. More people would vote if they thought that their vote was not wasted in elections where incumbents have a lock on re-election. A transferable vote allows anyone who so desires to vote for a Nader, or any other non-traditional party candidate, and not feel that it would be a wasted ballot, since if the voter's first choice lost, the vote would be moved to a safer alternative. Ireland has multimember constituencies, designed to allow minorities (of all kinds) representation while keeping the close connection between legislators and voters—not dissimilar to the proposals Lani Guinier made that had her swift-boated out of the Clinton Court as a "quota queen."
With its electronic voting, Supreme Court election-fixing and Homeland Security, American democracy appears less and less of a given with each presidential signing statement. Time may be running out for a critical examination of things we've taken for granted but that have led us to this pass.
©Copyright 2007, Public Concern Foundation Inc.
Click here The Washington Spectator
PRIMARY ELECTIONS
"Pillar of Democracy" May Be Worse Than Useless
By Ian Williams | 02/01/2007
n recent elections, reform-minded Americans have had their usual doubts about the manifestly undemocratic and clunky Electoral College, and a completely new set of deep doubts have arisen about how accurately the electronic voting systems have recorded the wishes of voters. There has also been some justifiable concern about how partisan election officials have purged the voter rolls. Despite the various concerns, and attempts to address them, the use of primary elections to choose party candidates has, surprisingly, escaped critical examination. People discuss how to make the primaries more efficient, more representative. But the real question should be, why are they held at all?
They are unique to the United States, which is even more anomalous, considering its national reputation, maybe not always deserved, for keeping government out of civic affairs. No other democratic country with embedded electoral traditions allows a state or federal government to determine how political parties choose their candidates or to run elections for them. Although it was only in the 1970s that primaries supplanted party conventions as the means of choosing presidential candidates, familiarity has bred undeserved contentment with the process. Primaries have been part of the U.S. electoral system for a century, and have thus acquired a patina of constitutional respectability, even though the Founding Fathers wisely never mentioned them, nor indeed political parties, for which George Washington and others had a profound distrust. The change has not necessarily advanced democracy, let alone the Democrats.
AN ACCELERATED SCHEDULE—Under discussion now is a move by several state governments to hold their primaries earlier in the year. Nevada is seeking to hold a primary for Democrats before the traditional lead-off polling in New Hampshire, and South Carolina will stage its primary right afterwards. The number of states that participate in Super Tuesday on February 5 could leap next year from six to fourteen, with powerhouses like California, Florida, Illinois and New Jersey joining in. Less than a month after the Iowa caucuses, the nominations could already be decided on both sides.
Since anything that puts an end to the opportunity for auto-evisceration that is a presidential primary has to be a good thing, a concentrated early primary may be welcome news. It would allow a rapid nomination and would give the winning candidate time to brush off some of the mud slung before the general election.
On the other hand, it means that prospective candidates to be the presidential nominee are already on the hoof a year in advance. Already 19 candidates (give or take Newt Gingrich) have declared or are "exploring" a run for president. The very weekend that Hillary Clinton announced that she was "in to win," New Mexico governor Bill Richardson pitched himself as a "uniter, a healer," and Kansas senator Sam Brownback posed as a "full-scale Ronald Reagan conservative." They are all spending freely and are prepared to keep on sprinkling greenbacks for the next year. And after a year, they will have to raise—and spend—even larger sums of money in a very short time to compete in the official primary election circuit.
So the other effect of the concentrated primaries is that the financial barrier for candidates is higher than ever. In general, only the rich need apply—or perhaps even more pernicious, those who are backed by the rich, since as we know, there are the occasional eccentric progressive billionaires.
In fact, instead of tinkering with the details, we might well reconsider the whole tedious and retrogressive machinery of the primaries, perverse both in principle and in practice. Having begun as a means of freeing politics from the smoke-filled rooms of the party machines, they have become the method by which hugely expensive rubber-chicken-filled banqueting rooms dominate politics. It is through the primaries that big money gets most leverage in the political process. A candidate as an individual rather than a party organization has to raise huge amounts of money for a primary election.
The grueling marathon is more a test of who can raise the most campaign cash than who can get the most votes. You may remember that Bill Clinton was not the front-runner early on in 1992. He lost the New Hampshire primary, but he carried on getting money when Paul Tsongas's political base ran out of funds and he had to drop out.
It's not a pretty picture. The primaries are an inverted Darwinian struggle to see which candidate has the least scruples about digging up the most dirt on his rivals, and can spend the most money to broadcast the slurs. Let us remember that the GOP picked up the Willy Horton slur from the Democratic primaries. At the end of this intra-party struggle, the exhausted victor is supposed to rally all the people who have been campaigning against him or her for a year to go out and canvass for the victor in the general election.
The need for money distorts the political campaigns and thus the platforms of the candidates. As a general rule, someone who wants to make the rich less so begins with a considerable handicap in the primaries. Candidates skew their policies towards the checkbooks as much as the voters. Their positions on health care, the Middle East, gun reform, transportation, Cuba, abortion and many other significant issues will be triangulated in a complex political calculus to garner maximum contributions as well as votes.
That is not to say that the voters are without power. Primary voters tend to be self-selected, more committed and ideological than the general electorate. The pernicious effects of that were clear with Bush senior, Bob Dole, and now John McCain, who as Republicans have all had to appear far more rigidly conservative in their positions than their records would otherwise suggest. The good news is that this tends to make them unelectable. The exception to this that has proven the rule is George W. Bush, who managed to sail under false centrist colors because the Christian right knew where his deeply conservative heart really was.
However, even on the Democratic side, the contortions of policy lead to a well-deserved public mistrust of politicians, who tailor their messages to different blocs of voters and check-writers. In January, John Edwards spoke to a conference in Israel, where he implied that he supported war with Iran and talked about keeping "All options on the table," presumably with potential donors in mind, while at the same time he was busily disavowing the war in Iraq for voters. Any candidate who wants to campaign for a single payer health-care system, popular with Democratic voters, can not only kiss goodbye any health insurance company donations but will have to accept that his rivals will clean up from them in return for silence or obfuscation on the issue.
VOTERS' RIGHTS—At present, in most states primary-election voters will have already declared their party allegiances when they come to the polls. To an outsider, this makes a mockery of the secret ballot, since voters' preferences are signaled on the public record for anyone to see. In an ideal world, of course, no harm would come to anyone for voting the wrong way . . . but has anyone noticed anything especially idealistic about the current GOP?
Even accepting that a tick on a registration form gives membership privileges to closed primary voters, there can be few excuses for the mockery of the democratic process that is the "open primary," which lets supporters of the opposing party muscle in and pick your party's candidate. In more than twenty states, you can sabotage the opposition in this way in the privacy of the polling booth. Whatever the views of Georgia Congresswoman Cynthia McKinney, it is clear that most Democrats in her district wanted her to represent them; but McKinney has twice been unseated by a combination of out-of-state money and Republican crossover votes in an open primary, in between winning a general election handsomely.
In a free society, as long as no criminal activity takes place within independent associations like parties, government should not interfere with how they order their affairs. Why shouldn't Democrats keep Republicans, or indeed professed Independents, from interfering in their internal affairs, one of the most important of which is surely their choice of whom to represent them in election campaigns?
In fact, an American political party has little or no choice about its candidates. It is carpetbagger heaven out there. Anyone with a bankroll can apply. New York's billionaire mayor Mike Bloomberg, a registered Democrat for many years, decided to run on the Republican ticket simply because it was cheaper and easier to buy the nomination.
Supporters of open primaries argue that they "increase voter participation," but there is little evidence of this. Indeed, since those who make this argument often spend so much time filtering the electoral rolls for alleged felons, there is room to doubt their sincerity.
In any case, this imaginary benefit is nullified by a certain reality: that the primaries turn voters into consumers of the policies of any personality with enough cash to run and to advertise themselves with all the sincerity and political content of a new toothpaste. The need to win an unknown and amorphous mass of voters has led to massive expenditures on television advertising, which in turn leads to huge demands for cash and all the consequences. That expenditure spills over into the general election, where at least public financing takes on some of the strain.
In many countries, parties are not allowed to abuse the airwaves in this way. Britain, for example, has very strict limits on spending by candidates. The Supreme Court's laughable invocation of the First Amendment to stop restrictions on spending is reminiscent of Anatole France's comment that "The law in its wisdom allows both the rich and the poor to sleep under the bridges over the Seine."
When campaign donations have such a disproportionate effect on policies, primaries deprive party supporters, or members as they are misnamed, of any real input into candidate or party platforms. In other democratic countries, ordinary party members can usually propose policies, choose—and lose—the leadership of their organizations. The Democratic primaries have been turning the party more and more into a P.O. box for corporate donations and reducing Democratic supporters to voting fodder, which is exactly where Tammany Hall had them before reformers instituted primaries, which were invented to break its power.
MUTING OPPOSITION—The system also has an effect on the political process, serving to make effective opposition much more difficult. In a parliamentary system, shortly after an election the defeated party chooses either to give its leader another chance, or picks someone new to carry the standard, so there is an acknowledged leader of the opposition. With the primaries and the attenuated party system, Democrats in opposition can wallow leaderless for the three years of a presidential term and then tear themselves apart in bitterly contested primaries.
This rudderlessness could afflict Republicans as well as Democrats, but this tends not to be. The Democratic Party still has the vestiges of a grass-roots organization, representing vociferous interest groups. The modern GOP is much more Bolshevik in its ideology and organization. When Karl Rove issues orders, Republican operatives all over the country tend to move in concert. The Democrats have no equivalent commissar, and even if they did, no one would take too much notice.
ALTERNATIVES AND THINGS TO AVOID—Of course, there may be worse things than primaries. In many other countries, where there is proportional representation party bosses dictate who gets on the party list, and in Britain the ever-eager-to-learn Tony Blair has been busily introducing candidate selections that exclude anyone who is insufficiently supportive of his style of leadership. Indeed, he has cemented his control by repelling half the Labour Party's membership since he took office.
As with the introduction of primaries themselves, there are often unintended consequences. It would be foolish to rush in with any kind of panacea when it comes to change, but we should surely be thinking about alternatives. For example:
• Hold the party convention early. In fact, hold it immediately after an unsuccessful presidential election, to choose the leadership and policies for the time in opposition and to give a candidate a good three years to build a reputation with the electorate.
• Build an actual party. There are over sixty million registered Democrats. If they were to join up as real party members, even paying a nominal subscription fee of $10 a year, not only could they fund elections without another corporate check, they would have some serious input in the matter of choosing candidates. A participation fee, no matter how nominal, would be a better test of party loyalty than just ticking a box when registering to vote.
• Use new technology to communicate. At one time, it could be argued that only government had the resources to canvass the opinions of party supporters. Apart from the very poor job that government has been doing in conducting elections recently, the technology and the need are now there for parties to seize control back from the state. With the growth of the Internet, as organizations like MoveOn.org have shown, party activities and fundraising can be much more democratically organized, cutting out expensive and sleazy TV advertising campaigns and putting the voter back in control of policy decisions and candidate choice.
• Consider new voting systems. In many other democracies, first-past-the-post elections have been abandoned for transferable voting systems. More people would vote if they thought that their vote was not wasted in elections where incumbents have a lock on re-election. A transferable vote allows anyone who so desires to vote for a Nader, or any other non-traditional party candidate, and not feel that it would be a wasted ballot, since if the voter's first choice lost, the vote would be moved to a safer alternative. Ireland has multimember constituencies, designed to allow minorities (of all kinds) representation while keeping the close connection between legislators and voters—not dissimilar to the proposals Lani Guinier made that had her swift-boated out of the Clinton Court as a "quota queen."
With its electronic voting, Supreme Court election-fixing and Homeland Security, American democracy appears less and less of a given with each presidential signing statement. Time may be running out for a critical examination of things we've taken for granted but that have led us to this pass.
©Copyright 2007, Public Concern Foundation Inc.
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