This Election Could Transform the Country, the GOP, and Capitalism
As I write this, things are looking good for an Obama victory, perhaps one of huge proportions. But well aware of the
GOP's history of massive voter-suppression and voter intimidation (examples of which are in the news each day**), and
the below-the-radar vote-counting manipulations, and quite cognizant of the dark strain of racism in American society,
I'm not assuming the election's in the bag.
A landslide Obama turnout may not be enough. It may take an electoral victory of tsunami proportions to counter the
Rove-ian dirty tricks operations, which is why so many of us are heading toward swing states this week to help make that
happen.
So as the campaigns enter their final week, I thought I'd take a longer view of the political landscape and see what the
post-Inauguration future might look like. Short version: Were Obama to emerge victorious, this election could well be
transformative in a number of areas beyond the obvious one of celebrating America's rendezvous with history.
NEVER-CEASING GOP CAMPAIGN
Republican leaders are quite aware of this transformative possibility and will do everything between now and next
Tuesday to make sure that doesn't happen. But if Obama were to win, even with a blow-out victory, one can safely predict
that a President Obama would enjoy no traditional "honeymoon" in his first months in office. The HardRightists, the same
ones who have been fighting Obama so viciously and disgracefully during the campaign, are not about to call it quits
after November.
Palin got their blood boiling, their prejudices affirmed, their extremism sanctioned. The HardRightists on their way out
will not take kindly to being separated from the levers and organ$ of power. They will do everything to ensure that a
President Obama will face unwavering attacks from his first day in office. No surrender, no making nice, no civil
discourse. This likelihood will be even worse if the Republicans hold on to enough Senate seats to continue
filibustering Democratic proposals.
These rightwing forces more or less did the same thing to Bill Clinton right after he assumed the presidency in 1992.
From day one, they invented supposed "scandals" one right after the other to upset his momentum, distract him from
governance, hope some of the mud would stick; eventually, they even went so far as to get him impeached, thus wrecking
any movement of his centrist-liberal agenda throughout much of Clinton's second term. Luckily, the American people
widely agreed that the Republicans went way too far in hounding Clinton -- that lying about sex did not rise to the
level of impeachable offenses -- and successfully pressured the Senate not to convict.
HOW REPUBLICAN PARTY COULD SPLIT
It's obvious that if the Republicans are swept badly in both the presidential contest and in the Senate and House next
week, there will be major soul-searching within the party, perhaps even a split into two openly warring camps rather
than the relatively covert civil war currently being waged, as fingers of blame are being pointed over their current
chaotic campaign. It will be the night of the long knives as the two sides try to control the future of the Republican
Party.
One camp, more ideological at heart (with Sarah Palin, if she's not indicted in Alaska, playing a key role), will argue
that the Republicans lost because they "weren't conservative enough," that they sold out the ideological "purity" of the
party by taking wishy-washy stands instead of proudly championing more solidly "conservative" causes. In essence, Palin
staffers are starting to propound this case and, at least according to key McCain staffers, who have referred to Palin
as a "diva" who is shedding her McCain minders and going "rogue," she can be expected to strike out even more on her own
along these extreme lines. You betcha.
The other camp, the more pragmatic-realist side (with perhaps a key role played by Colin Powell), will argue that the
voters are telling the GOP loudly and clearly that Rove's narrow, base-oriented political strategy doesn't work anymore.
The Republicans, they will say, blew their opportunity by going too far to the right and, in so doing, took the country
into an unwinnable war, wrecked the economy and risked destroying the party. An obtuse McCain, full of himself and his
biography, made no changes from that base-only strategy. To regain power, these traditional-conservative critics might
argue, the GOP has to distance itself from the extremists and neo-cons, jettison the smear-politics, and move closer to
the Republican Party's moderate locus.
In this scenario, the Democrats would rule from the center-left, and the Republicans, to be competitive, would have to
offer a more center-right agenda, resting on a conservative ideology but made more palatable to an American citizenry
that eschews extremism and hovers mostly around the middle.
It's not likely but it is possible that the competing Republican wings will be unable to find a way of sharing power,
the result being two distinct political entities, perhaps with the extreme rightwingers joining forces with all sorts of
fringe parties and groups.
HOW THE DEMOCRATS COULD SPLIT
If Obama carries his party to victory, especially so if the Democrats sweep both the House and Senate, the new president
might well be able to pass significant changes in laws from the CheneyBush years, dealing with tax-reform, education and
health care, as well as restoring respect for Constitutional protections and starting the withdrawal from Iraq, etc.
But if Obama were to be aced out of the presidency due to clear illegalities and outright theft of the election -- being
the third Democrat to be so denied under suspicius circumstances in just a few years -- the despair and anger unleashed
would be incalcuable. Talk about "revolution" and/or leaving the country might suddenly become very real for many. This
would especially be the case if the "losing" candidate and the Dems hadn't put up a fight in the courts for an honest,
transparent recount in states where the evidence of electoral fraud is widespread.
Internally, there would be major blood-letting and transformation of the Democratic Party. As with the Republicans, the
Dems might well carry out a political civil war between two opposing camps.
One can well imagine that the more centrist/party establishment camp would think long and hard before nominating another
African-American as its standard-bearer. They would look for a plain vanilla, non-controversial candidate, one willing
to compromise principles and imitate what the successful Republicans do. GOP lite, in other words.
The more progressive wing of the party might well argue that the party "lost" because it moved away from its traditional
Democratic values and principles in a desire to make itself more palatable to Independents and wayward Republicans. In
other words, because it "wasn't liberal enough."
As speculated above with regard to the Republicans, it's possible but not likely that the fractured Democratic Party
could split into two openly warring political entities, with the progressives, for example, attempting to make an
alliance with the Greens, Naderites and disaffected moderate Republicans under a new party banner.
THE APPEARANCE OF SEMI-"SOCIALISM"
But regardless of who is installed in the White House in January, one thing is clear: American capitalism's financial
and social/political system, which has undergone enormous shocks in the past few months, may never revert back to the
status quo ante.
The clearest signs of this transformative shift:
1. George W. Bush and Henry Paulson, true believers in unregulated free-market capitalism, overnight became
semi-"socialist" in behavior. Reality made it necessary for them to compromise their free-market ideology and partially
nationalize banks and giant financial institutions. A monumental catastrophe does that to you. You can't return to the
conservative shibboleths that clearly had failed.
2. Alan Greenspan, the grand doyen behind the American economy for nearly four decades, admitted in public testimony
before Congress that the laissez-faire deregulation philosopy that has guided his life is badly flawed. The former
chairman of the Federal Reserve Bank said the current economic meltdown in the U.S., which has now spread its major
recession all over the globe, rested on faulty "models." He was shocked, shocked!, to learn this. We're supposed to believe that the possibility of widespread failure of those greed-at-any-price models
never occurred to him. Right.
Those "models," which were pushed by far-right conservative thinkers like Ayn Rand and Milton Friedman, derived from an
ideological belief that a free market always corrects its excesses, thus keeping the dread hand of government off the
financial tiller. Now, Greenspan admits, there appears to be a necessary role for government regulation when banks and
other financial institutions don't act in their own self-interest. It's still "SELF-interest," you see, since the
Randian conservatives, of which Greenspan is one, refuse to recognize the concept of a "PUBLIC interest."
REGULATION NECESSARY FOR SURVIVAL
Given the complexities associated with a global economy, and the unsupervised power of financial entities to do harm to
themselves and others, in a sense it doesn't really matter whether it's McCain or Obama in the Oval Office. Both would
have to concern themselves with righting the ship of state and the financial institutions that keep it stable and
functioning. Doing so requires government oversight and regulation of the giant corporate and financial behemoths. In
short, America will become, to a greater or lesser degree -- with enough greed-loopholes built into the new system to
satisfy the Wall Street elites -- a distinctly American variant of the "social democracies" in Europe.
Even McCain now realizes the necessity for action in this direction; Obama would be more amenable to the kind of
regulatory change that will be required, and might even borrow other ideas and policies from FDR's Great Depression/"New
Deal" era in the 1930s, such as temporary, government-sponsored jobs programs that would quickly pump money back into
the economy from the bottom up.
What's taking place right before our eyes is a seismic shift of tectonic economic plates in America, with all sorts of
transformative implications to society, the economy, the political parties themselves. We are in for mighty interesting
times in the decades ahead.
THE ATTACK ON SYRIA
These times have become all the more interesting because, as I write this, the CheneyBush Administration has attacked
yet another country: It sent four helicopters, two of them full of special forces commandoes -- that is to say, U.S.
troops on the ground -- to shoot up a construction sight in Syria a few miles from the Iraq border, killing eight. The
action is less surprising than the timing, a week before a presidential election.
I think one has to interpret the action in light of that timing as possibly a way to change the headlines and focus as
McCain's chances grow slimmer, a way to highlight the "national security" issue that supposedly helps McCain, a way to
make sure a President Obama would be locked into even more foreign-policy messes. Maybe all three at once. No doubt,
more will be revealed in the coming days. These guys are desperate and will try anything.#
**Hundreds of thousands, maybe several million, Democratic-leaning voters have been and are being purged from voting
rolls; Bush has ordered the DoJ to start a "voter-fraud" investigation in Ohio, even in the face of a Supreme Court
ruling ordering regular voting protocols (rather than provisional ballots) to proceed for the 200,000 citizens involved;
there are numerous cases of "vote-flipping" in various states on touch-screen voting machines; there are all kinds of
voter-intimidation tactics being rolled out in various states, including attempts to keep college students from voting;
and one can anticipate what happened in 2004, when just a few days before the voting, the Rove forces launched a massive
"robocall" operation around the country supposedly coming from Dem campaigns, re-calling again and again at all hours of
the day and night, in order to annoy and anger voters enough that they might decide not to vote Democratic. "Grand Theft
Robo."
*************
Bernard Weiner, Ph.D. in government & international relations, has taught at universities in California and Washington, worked as a writer/editor with the
San Francisco Chronicle for two decades, and currently serves as co-editor of The Crisis Papers (www.crisispapers.org). To comment: crisispapers@comcast.net .
First published by The Crisis Papers and Democratic Underground 10/28/08.
Copyright 2008 by Bernard Weiner.
Original URL: www.crisispapers.org/essays8w/voters.htm