Religions > Atheism > Re: OT: American voters have two choices: Bush or Bush-lite
| Topic: |
Religions > Atheism |
| User: |
"stoney" |
| Date: |
21 Aug 2003 05:19:43 PM |
| Object: |
Re: OT: American voters have two choices: Bush or Bush-lite |
On 19 Aug 2003 01:39:05 -0700, (maff), Message ID:
<18510aff.0308190039.3599f534@posting.google.com> wrote in alt.atheism;
American voters have two choices: Bush or Bush-lite
http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,3604,1021443,00.html
Hugo Young in Vermont: To win in 2004, Democrats must confront the
hard right.
I'm sorry, but I'm voting for 'none of the above.'
(snip)
/quote
American voters have two choices: Bush or Bush-lite
To win in 2004, Democrats must confront the hard right
Hugo Young in Vermont
Tuesday August 19, 2003
The Guardian
The oldest saw in modern politics is that elections are won only on the
centre ground. Extremists have to abandon, or at any rate disguise,
their passions, and move to positions as close to being all things to
all fickle voters as they can invent. That's how Tony Blair made Labour
electable. The coalitions of continental Europe are built round the same
inescapable proposition. In such politics, nuance replaces conviction,
and manoeuvre boldness, as the identifying marks of a winning team.
What's going on in America as the 2004 election begins is unnervingly
the opposite. It's one of the more extraordinary spectacles a political
scientist, or journalist, let alone a professional politician, could
encounter. George Bush is running his campaign from the same fringe
position as the one he has adopted for his presidency.
This is a hard-right administration offering virtually no concessions to
the soothing niceties that might make it more electorally attractive to
voters who are not Republicans. Its tax policy is grotesquely loaded
against the masses and in favour of the rich. Its bias on the
environment unfailingly comes out on the side of the big commercial
interests. It is daily tearing up tracts of policy and practice that
protected the basic rights of people snared in the justice system. It is
the hardest right administration since Herbert Hoover's from a very
different era. And, which is the point, delights in being so. There is
no apology or cover-up.
But even that isn't the most striking thing about the set-up as it now
stands. For this we have to turn to the Democrats. Unlike Bush, many
Democrats are sticking to the conventional wisdom. They grope for some
kind of centre ground. But so far has the territory shifted, thanks to
the Republicans' shameless stakeout on the hard right, that their quest
continues to drain their party of most of its meaning and any of its
capacity to inspire.
The rules are being observed, but we find that in some circumstances
these rules are a fallacy. They draw a party so far into the orbit of
its rival as to render itself meaningless as anything except a political
machine of variable potency around the country. Yet the dominant mode of
most presidential candidates is still to cling to the kind of centrism
that defines them at best as Bush-lite, at worst as people who have
nothing to say that could send the smallest shiver up the spine of
afloating voter.
One should hesitate to second-guess all these massively professional
politicians, laden with polls. But their reflex looks to me as
unnecessary as it is self-destructive. One way to respond to Bush's
rewrite of the rule book - which covers more contentious ground than
Ronald Reagan's campaigns ever did, for example - may be to meekly
accept the new setting for old maxims. The other is to treat the maxims,
in present times, as a snare.
For one thing, many Democrats seem to have forgotten that they did win
the election last time. For four years it has been idle to challenge the
Florida vote and the bizarre workings of the electoral college, but now
is the time to recall that in 2000 half a million more Americans voted
for Al Gore's progressive version of the future than Bush's more
conservative one. Bush was still posing as a bit centrist then, and Gore
was scarcely a raving liberal. Gore mostly stuck to the Clinton third
way doctrine that had taken the Democrats away from the narrowest
version of their past. But there was a left-right choice, and more
Americans voted left than right.
In most systems, that would have been another reason for the technical
winners to gravitate towards the centre. Since that did not happen, it
is instead an excellent reason for the losers to rediscover their raison
d'être. Yet most of them seem mesmerised with terror at the prospect,
and full of guff about Democratic "values" which they take to excuse
them from advancing any awkward Democratic policies.
The Iraq war is to blame for this, but only partly. It is Bush's alibi
for everything else. To the extent that voters dislike his right-wingery
on domestic matters, Iraq and terrorism give cover to the Great Leader.
We may be sure he will exploit this until the day of the election. It
puts Democrats in a bind, though something has changed when dreary Joe
Lieberman, an early war supporter, now feels it necessary to bleat
defensively that his was a "principled" position, and posturing John
Kerry - probably the favourite as things stand - calibrates a position
edging finely away from believer to mealy-mouthed critic. Another year
of Baghdad body bags, with Osama bin Laden still at large, and the
politics of the war cannot be so neatly predicted.
For any Democrat to take advantage of Bush's waning popularity and
overcome his vast campaign finances, however, he must have something to
say. There needs to be some clarity, on all fronts. The other day, the
same edition of the New York Times carried stories saying that neither
young African-Americans nor the Boston Irish could any longer be counted
on as part of the core vote. Is this heresy surprising when nobody knows
with any certainty what Democrats stand for? If a party can't fire up
its core vote, it will be deader quicker than if it can't draw in people
who've never voted for it before. Watching what Bush has done to both
the economy and the constitution, it should be easy for a Democrat to
come up with soundbites and articles of simple faith to inspire a few
more than the millions of Americans who voted for Gore last time.
Wiseacres continue to pretend otherwise. They think Howard Dean, the
most lefty of the candidates, and former governor of the state of
Vermont, could never get elected. Transfixed by the attractions of
triangulated centrism, they're prepared to have its geometry laid out
exclusively by their opponents. They come out against a bit of the Bush
tax plan but not all of it. They're all but silent, as are much of the
media, on what anti-terrorism psychosis is doing to civil liberties.
Yet the Republicans didn't get where they are today by such half-baked
timidity. The challenge they make is for the life and death of the soul
of the America very many Americans still believe in. What their
opponents need is a leader whose voice rings more eloquently than Bush's
- surely not the hardest contest to win. That won't happen until they
abandon their backing and filling, and their belief that being a
Democrat no longer adds up to anything more than a milder version of
their enemies.
"Extremism in the defence of liberty is no vice ... Moderation in the
pursuit of justice is no virtue." Barry Goldwater said that 40 years
ago. It was the start of the recovery of the right. The words now belong
rather exactly in the other side's mouth. If they came out of Senator
Kerry's this autumn, they'd make him sound less like a calculating wimp.
h.young@guardian.co.uk
(c) 2003 The Guardian
/end quote
Stoney
"Designated Rascal and Rapscallion
and
SCAMPERMEISTER!"
When in doubt, SCAMPER about!
When things are fair, SCAMPER everywhere!
When things are rough, can't SCAMPER enough!
/end humour alert
alt.atheism military veteran #11
{so much for the 'no atheists in foxholes' rubbish}
.
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| User: "JTEM" |
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| Title: Re: OT: American voters have two choices: Bush or Bush-lite |
21 Aug 2003 09:28:26 PM |
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"stoney" <stoney@the.net> wrote
maff91@yahoo.com (maff), wrote in alt.atheism;
American voters have two choices: Bush or Bush-lite
http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,3604,1021443,00.html
Hugo Young in Vermont: To win in 2004, Democrats must confront the
hard right.
I'm sorry, but I'm voting for 'none of the above.'
That would be "Bush."
.
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