THE NATION ON SUNDAY, MAY 20, 2012
World News
63
The American presidential contest gears T up HE American presidential contest is entering full throttle. Such contests are never for the faint of heart. Yet, this one promises a throwback to a bygone era where almost no insult was too ugly to hurl at an opponent and where unscrupulous, mercenary political operatives become the most valued assets of a campaign. This is raw, almost citric, electioneering; it is democracy functioning on instinctual bias and emotion instead of reason and intellect. It is a time for ignorant blathering rather than intelligent gnomes. The spirit of 2012 election will resemble those elections that occurred prior to the American Civil War. Slavery was the subtheme of those elections. President Obama’s color and his supposed foreignness will be this election’s undercurrent. As a result, this election will be an election of hate. America is thrust into a new socio-cultural civil war, more subtle than its 19th century predecessor but every bit as mean and potentially as tectonic. The Republican Party has effectively chosen its candidate in former Massachusetts governor, Mitt Romney. In so doing, the party has swept aside all minor pretenders to the crown in order to coronate the biggest pretender to happen along in over a generation. Romney is an infinitely malleable vessel, a canvas that relentlessly erases then repaints itself. In his quest for high office, he has become the utmost politician: a genuine fake. There is almost nothing he will not say or do to win the elections. Worse, his loyal minions along with those who may be indifferent to Romney but detest the President are willing to do and say that rare thing that Romney won’t. Those of you who have suffered the tedium of regularly reading this column know that I am not an admirer of the President. I believe he is too much the conformist guardian of the status quo and financial elites to do much good. When he tries to burnish his conservative credentials by advocating fiscal austerity, cutting important social services to the poor and reducing government programs that could build the nation’s human and physical infrastructure, he is capable of doing harm. All in all, I believe the President is a decent man with a vulnerable moral compass. He does not mean wrong yet he causes more than is unavoidable because he is enthralled by the ways of the powerful. He may believe in progress but he doesn’t believe it enough to push against the pillars of a tarnished establishment. In the end, he conforms. He leads by following the trend laid out for him. As such, he is like the protagonists in the ancient Greek tragedies. He is endowed with considerable gifts yet challenged by a mortal flaw — in this instance, the love of the moneyed elite – that prevents him from his finer destiny. It instead chains him to a precarious situation bounded by imminent failure. If Obama is a tragedy, Romney is a farce. This man has changed position on so many key issues ranging from health care to counter-terrorism that either he is possessed of multiple personalities or of such an obsession for office that he has become an unfettered prevaricator. The most astounding volte face dealt with an important aspect of domestic economic policy, the emergency bailout of the automobile industry. At the inception of his administration, President Obama was faced with a Hobson’s choice. Either enlarge the emergency assistance his predecessor had provided America’s car makers or allow those firms to sink. A significant percentage of America’s remaining manufacturing capacity was linked to the car industry. Allowing the companies to sink was to consign the nation to depression. There was no real option other than support the companies in order to keep America itself from following down. The government injected money into the companies,
Those who lie to acquire a thing will do worse to keep it
•Romney
•Obama By Brian Browne
in effect becoming their dominant shareholder and owner. Spewing free market lava, Romney and those like him accused Obama of infecting the American economy with the leaven of European socialism. Romney’s cure was to withdraw all government financial assistance, allowing the firms to fall into bankruptcy and likely dissolution. From the demise of the ineffective companies would come the reallocation of labor and assets toward more productive ventures. This is what the textbooks say and Romney mimicked them because mimicry of conservatism is his stock and trade. Trying to prove himself to be an economic know-it-all, he proved to be a know-nothing. His remedy would have been worse than the sickness. Had the car manufacturers fell, they would have doomed over 10 percent of America’s manufacturing capacity with them. Instead of freeing labor and capital for more effective allocation elsewhere, the purist free market attitude would have consigned thousands upon thousands of workers to unemployed destitution. This attitude would have sent forever to the dustbin these once venerable firms and symbols of American manufacturing prowess. A strange thing happened along the way. Critics charged that government intervention would be a foolish and silly lark that would only make the inefficient car makers greater wastrels. The opposite happened. With the benefit of the government’s visible hand, the companies became better organised. They began to produce better, more affordable cars in short order. Romney and the free marketers had been proven wrong. Their socalled infallible theories of the infallible market were but secular theology refuted by real world fact. With the right personnel and perspective, government can be every bit as efficient an economic player as a large private entity. An even stranger transformation took place. Instead of admitting he was wrong, Romney simply decided to redraft the historical text. He now claims credit for the success of the auto bailout. The man has the effrontery to state that President Obama had done nothing except follow the advice Romney gave him. Even with the wide latitude given a politician during the hurly-burly of campaign season, this recast of an event of such recent import is as ribald a theft as one can attempt without incurring criminal liability. The auto bailout fabrications testify to
Romney’s modus operandi. He has committed similar transgressions against the truth and consistency on more than a dozen issues, large and small. The man is like a chameleon pinned against a rainbow. He knows not which color he should be. He therefore tries to be them all. With his many flaws and missteps, Romney runs a close race against President Obama. The most recent CBS/New York Times polls gave Romney a three percentage point lead over the President. This goes to show Romney is not so much a candidate as he is a rallying point for those who dislike Obama. For a decisive segment of the population, the election is not one of Obama versus Romney. It is not even a referendum on Obama’s substantive performance. It is an election pitting Obama against the concept of the prototypical American president. Obama’s problem is not that he is running against a formidable opponent made of flesh and bone. He is running against idea whose name dare not be spoken by friend or foe yet one that is omnipresent and strong. It is that discreet form of racism that says a Black man is eligible for an important position provided his performance is vastly superior to that of his White rivals. President Obama and his team believed he had the strong upper hand but this recent poll should dispel complacency. Obama is in this predicament not because he has done so poorly but because he has not done very well. At bottom, he has proven to be a relatively competent mainstream political operative whose middling governance has been handsomely punctuated and made to seem more than it is by excellent oratorical skills. He has done enough to show he is qualified to be president. But as a Black man, he might not have done enough to remain president. Obama’s natural caution has blinded him to this quandary. He continues to believe that to succeed he must be cautious to a fault so that he does not alienate too many Whites. Yet, the truth may be more complicated. His mocha complexion alienates four of ten whites. He need not do anything wrong for them to signal thumbs down on him, let alone his presidency. These people will vote against him even if he walked atop water, raised the dead, and cured the dying. These people will vote Romney. But the fate of the election revolves around another group of mostly White voters. During the 2008 election, most of these voters went toward Obama because they saw in him a dramatic personality that might lift them from the recession break-
ing all around them. In that instance, concern about economic disaster trumped race. No one cares about the complexion of his rescuer until the danger has passed. Obama managed to save them from the worse but not from the bad. They did not sink completely but they were battered and wounded. Obama, the heroic candidate, was reduced to Obama, the pedestrian chief executive. This is where the Obama paradox manifests. He feels the path to electability is to be as mainstream as mainstream can be. For those voters who operate mostly on political logic, this calculation may be valid. However, most voters are not governed by logic. Their reasoning may defy his political equation. Many will feel Obama is just another politician, perhaps only nominally better than the undifferentiated horde of office seekers. If this is the case, they would much rather go with a mediocrity that looks more like them than with a darker skinned one with a foreign name. Obama won the 2008 election based on the implicit promise of delivering the spectacular. That promise went unfulfilled. For many, President Obama 2012 is a dwarf and inferior vintage to candidate Obama 2008. It is uncertain if these same voters will break for him as they did four years ago. Because he has been unable to distinguish himself as an outstanding president, his skin color may prove to be a subtler yet more difficult obstacle than in the prior election. To move this group of voters to Romney’s side, the bigots have already intensified the racial attacks. One group commissioned television ads resurrecting the controversy surrounding the intemperate remarks of the President’s former Pastor, Jeremiah Wright. The tasteless ads were quickly pulled back. Romney and other Republican repudiated them. But this was all theatre. The deed was already done. Obama’s connection to Wright has been surreptitiously laced back into public square as if by innuendo. Also, conservatives have dug up a booklet written by a former literary agent of the President. Written to publicize the autobiography where Obama discusses his Kenyan father, the pamphlet erroneously states Obama was born in Kenya. Conservatives are using this to signal Obama’s alien heritage and to foment more talk of his legal ineligibility for the White House. These bigots would rather people believe a literary agent who did not know Obama until adulthood and only in a contractual relationship to promote a book is a better repository of the man’s birth records than the Bureau of Statistics of the state of Hawaii. For them, the agent is the true chronicler of fact and the state government is guilty of taking literary license by affirming the man was born in the United States. Again, this is but another attempt to sway enough wary white voters so that the scales tip against Obama. During this election, many issues will be raised. The economy, foreign policy, gay rights and women’s rights will figure prominently in the discussion. But the importance and impact of the discussions will not be as they appear on the surface. The current running through all of this is whether enough white voters decide that Obama’s average performance is sufficiently underwhelming that they feel no tinge of conscience in holding his race against him. Obama thinks he should be favored because this election should be a case of “the devil you know against the angel that you don’t.” What he doesn’t realise is that for so many voters he remains and will forever be the one who is unknown despite his four years in office. If this election were based solely on logic, Obama could rest assured. However, since the election will be influenced by “primordial” spirits and feelings, he will have to sweat this one out until the last moment. So much for a better future. America is merely reliving the ugly elements of its past in a new way.