June
7, 2001
News from
Neptune
Defunct Democrats
By Carl Estabrook
Democrats bleating that that awful Ralph
Nader spoilt their little game, and that it was his responsibility
to keep his mouth shut so their man could be President -- there
are few sights more pathetic on the current American political
scene. (An example can be found in last week's edition, in a
column called I think, "Moving It Right.") Of course
it's true that Al Gore couldn't even carry his own state, Tennessee
(and as James Carville remarks, "George Bush couldn't even
carry his own country," losing by a half-million votes nationwide).
The keening continues that
in only a few months Bush has driven "the national welfare,
economic stability, and the global environment into decline."
(In fact of course the Democrats _need_ a recession like the
one that turfed out Bush I in order to defeat Bush II.) Meanwhile
a more cogent interpreter, the political cartoonist Tom Tomorrow
(whose work also appears in these pages) considered these Democrats'
theme, "Those damned Republicans are pure evil," and
pointed out that the environmental enormities and the like that
they'd been charged with, were accomplished with Democrats' connivance.
Clinton's Secretary of Labor has recently pronounced the Democratic
party "dead," and the quondam candidate, Mr. Gore,
seems to have devoted himself to building the party primarily
by gaining weight (some forty pounds, by current estimate).
Almost six months on, it's
possible to see the Presidential election in more perspective.
In a recent article the historian Perry Anderson makes the case
that Clinton himself was the reason that the Democrats lost an
election they should so easily have won: "Clinton had no
particular convictions, beyond the desire to stay in office --
he attracted no broad or dedicated following. More acutely, however,
the scandals that surrounded his Presidency made it impossible
to convert into any kind of rallying point. He was plainly guilty
of the charges -- molestation in Arkansas, perjury and obstruction
of justice in Washington -- against him, which were fully impeachable."
Why then did impeachment fail?
Primarily says Anderson because of "attachment to the quasi-monarchical
status of the Presidential office itself, as embodiment of national
identity in the world at large, a late-twentieth-century fixation
foreign to the Founders. But if popular opinion did not want
impeachment, instinctively seeking to protect the Presidency,
for the same reasons it did not relish Clinton's conduct, an
indignity to the office not easily forgotten."
It took the Economist of London
to do the numbers: "Gore took every state where Clinton's
'favorability rating' was average or above (57%), with the exception
of Florida, while Bush won every state where it was even a mere
point below average, except for Oregon and New Mexico (where
he lost by less than one-fourth of 1% of the vote). Clinton was
dead weight on Gore even in Arkansas."
The Financial Times, which
supported him, concluded "Clinton's was in the end a monumentally
inconsequential Presidency." Anderson comments, "The
triviality of the ruler does not, of course, exonerate his rule.
If Clinton's positive impact on American society was minimal,
his negative legacies at home and abroad were considerable."
So when the Democrats need
an heroic model, they must go back to the Kennedy administration,
forty years ago. But that period needs to be examined closely
(and not as misrepresented in a current movie). Kennedy's policies
and pronouncements, beginning with his inaugural address, were
in fact semi-fascist. A long train of abuses -- literally murderous
policy, at home and abroad -- leads directly back to the "Kennedy
intellectuals." (The Bush administration recognizes the
usefulness of the model by copying Kennedy policies, such as
the tax cut.)
Meanwhile, the death squads
founded by the Kennedy policy-makers continue to operate, and
US-sponsored and funded killing continues under Bush as it did
under Clinton in Iraq, Palestine, and Colombia. But the cracks
in the facade must be worrisome to the prophets of politics as
usual, of "working within the system" -- those Democrats
who urge us to "Come home, America!" and stick close
to nurse for fear of something worse...
Alexander Cockburn has argued
that the results of the Presidential election were about as good
as could be expected: Clinton is repudiated, Bush is severely
weakened, and Nader is shown to have made the difference. He
might have added that public attention has been focussed on the
partisan courts and exclusionary elections, both of which will
be reformed only at public insistence.
Meanwhile real politics continue
elsewhere this month: in Cincinnati, against the national policy
of providing racist cops and repressive drug laws to corral the
dangerous classes in the inner cities (the US, with 4% of world
population, has 25% of prisoners); and in Quebec, against the
business plans to confiscate the work and environment of the
citizens of the hemisphere. CP
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