For once, foreign policy is a major issue
in a US election, and not just the Iraq fiasco.
Indeed, it is possible that North Korea's Dear
Leader Kim Jong-il may have inadvertently won the
US mid-term elections for the Democrats with his
nuclear explosion. Until then, there were definite
signs that the beleaguered White House was
considering military operations against Iran - a
new October surprise to concentrate the voters'
minds on the "war on terror".
Even this
White House crew would have difficulty justifying
military action against the
ayatollahs - who deny they even want a bomb -
while leaving a triumphant Kim boasting and
demonstrating that he actually has one.
As
a result, the elections could break the long
Republican monopoly on federal power, if, as seems
possible, President George W Bush's party loses
either the Senate or the House of Representatives
- or even both.
Of course, the White House
has made the major contribution to its own defeat.
North Korean nukes notwithstanding, any
White House plan to attack Iran was unlikely to
work. Two years ago, the Republicans may have been
able to persuade voters that when you are stuck
deep in a muddy hole you dig downward to find the
exit. Now, despite the best cover that the media
moguls can give it, the administration has lost
the confidence of the public.
In addition
to that domestic distrust, no amount of gloss or
conservative talk-show hosts can cover the
disaster of the Iraq war, and as the American
casualties mount they are becoming less and less
easy to hide. Apart from a few neo-conservative
ideologues, there is no constituency at all for
sending US troops to die in a new Korean war, let
alone in Iran. Indeed, the majority of voters
think the US should be talking directly to
Pyongyang and Tehran on the nuclear issue, which,
hidebound by ideology, the White House refuses to
do.
The turning point was the fiasco of
Hurricane Katrina, when the depths of
incompetence, patronage and corruption were
revealed to a shocked United States. It has
continued with scandal after scandal, as bribery,
gay pedophilia and similar issues have chewed away
at the Republican pretensions to being the party
of "moral values" of the kind espoused by southern
and midwestern Americans.
It is not that
the Democratic Party is particularly moral or
resistant to corruption, but a decade in
opposition has not really given it the same
opportunities to dip into the till in Washington
as its Republican colleagues.
Unprecedentedly, polls now show that the
public thinks the Democrats would do better on
security issues, and they have always tended to
trust them more on domestic issues. Nonetheless,
incumbency is a powerful thing in the United
States. The founding fathers, a disparate
group of local elites, carefully designed the
constitution to avoid any one group or party
getting overweening power. For years now, the
Republicans have bucked the spirit of those checks
and balances.
With an almost Bolshevik
discipline, ideology and drive to power, they have
used their power to pack the judicial benches,
federally and locally, redrawing congressional
districts and rewriting the electoral rules in the
states that they control. The fruits of that were
a Republican majority on the Supreme Court, all
nominally pledged to support states' rights,
overturning the Florida courts on the 2000
presidential election in one of its most
shamelessly partisan judgments since it enforced
the return of escaped slaves from the north to the
plantations.
They have looted the Treasury
to hand over untold billions to their wealthy
supporters, who, in return, have poured cash into
the fight against most Democratic challengers,
either directly or through a shadowy range of
foundations, media operations and allegedly
independent committees.
We have to
remember next Tuesday's election is not just a
referendum on Iraq. US elections are overwhelming
about local officials and issues. We can guarantee
that the Republicans and their surrogates will
pull some of the sleaziest stunts imaginable in
the next week to take people's minds off the
unholy mess in the Middle East. Any party that
slimes a paraplegic war veteran for lack of
patriotism will clearly stop at nothing, but that
is precisely what they did last time to defeat
triple-amputee senator Max Cleland of Georgia.
On the positive side, millions of voters
who earlier did not want to roll in the mud of a
US election have been exasperated and scared into
action. If there is a victory, apart from the
ineptitude of Bush, a major factor will be the
upsurge of grassroots movements such as
MoveOn.org, marshaling election workers, cash and
enthusiasm to key fights.
Many people
watched the last two elections with horror at the
oddities of electronic voting machines, changing
rules and the exclusion of voters, and lawyers and
volunteers across the country are watching
carefully.
That raises the perennial
question of the Democratic Party, of which it
could be said, as Dorothy Parker said of Los
Angeles, there's no there there. Control of what
passes for a Democratic Party nationally is still
firmly in the hands of the more conservative wing.
While there is no doubt that a Democratic seizure
of either house of Congress would be good news,
there is a long way to go for euphoria. Some of
the Democratic contenders have triangulated
themselves so far to the right that even if they
do not follow White House aide Karl Rove's orders,
they will vote for reactionary measures of their
own accord.
In the long term the dilemma
is how those motivated millions can exercise their
continuing influence on the Democratic Party
machinery in a way to keep it on course, and
electable - which is not necessarily the same as
pandering to the modern version of the old
southern Democrats around the Clintons in the
Democratic Leadership Council. In general,
American electors are more sensible than the
people who buy their way into office with money
from vested interests, but even without wobbly
voting machines, they have difficulty in
controlling their alleged representatives.
Ian Williams is author of
Deserter: Bush's War on Military Families,
Veterans and His Past, Nation Books, New York.
(Copyright 2006 Asia Times Online Ltd.
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