That other election
March 25th, 2004
Like their former colonials, the Filipinos, Americans will also go to the polls this year, though some five months later, in November. Re-electionist George W. Bush will most likely go up against Democratic Party Senator John Kerry.
A decorated veteran of the Vietnam war, Kerry is leading in his party’s state primaries, and is expected to amass enough delegate votes to be its standard-bearer. As of last week he had 685 delegates out of the 2,162 needed to secure the Democratic Party nomination, compared to second placer John Edwards. Kerry is expected to sweep some ten states Tuesday (Wednesday in the Philippines), among them California and New York.
At stake is the presidency of the most powerful country in the world, whose governance affects not only the lives of 200 million Americans but also of virtually everyone else’s on the planet, including those of 78 million Filipinos. Though mostly ignorant about the rest of the world, whatever the American electorate decides this November will affect millions of people across the planet in terms of US policies across a broad range of issues, among them what the next US administration thinks is the US’ role and place in the world.
During Bush’s watch that role has been interpreted as the furtherance of US economic and political interests via absolute military dominance on land, sea, air and space. The world saw that policy clearly at work last year with the US invasion of Iraq, a “war of choice” Bush and company launched to achieve a number of tactical and strategic goals, among them securing for the US (and the multinational companies Bush and his vice president Dick Cheney are in league with) dependable access to the world’s second largest oil reserves as well as basing rights for US troops—part of a process of global deployment which has resulted in US military presence in some 130 out of 190 countries recognized by the United Nations.
The Bush policy of preemptive war does not stop at Iraq. The policy—which includes a plank on the first use of nuclear weapons—is likely to result in another century of war much like the 20th century was, as predicted by US historian Gabriel Kolko. Iraq is only one of the three countries Bush proclaimed in 2002 as constituting the axis of evil: there are still North Korea and Iran, which are not incidentally being widely portrayed in the compliant US media as “rogue states” arming themselves with weapons of mass destruction.
At the heart of the Bush doctrine is the reversal of the last 100 years of human history, particularly the period of decolonization, which among others established the right of peoples to choose their governments, and to chart their own destinies. The Bush government claims for the United States the imperial right, by virtue of superior military power, to intervene anywhere as well as to decide what government best suits it, of course under the guise of providing the subject peoples the blessings of freedom and democracy.
At home Bush’s governance has been driven primarily by a bias for the rich, as most evidently obvious in his tax-cut policies. It is estimated, for example, that 88 percent of Americans will be able to save $100 on their taxes, while the 16 members of Bush’s cabinet—all of them multimillionaires—will save $42,000 in taxes thanks to their boss’ tax cut program. That amount—$42,000 —was the average annual US household income in 2001.
Bush has stubbornly insisted on the tax cuts despite a galloping US budget deficit ($374 billion in 2003), compared to the US budget surplus of $127 billion in January 2001 when he succeeded Bill Clinton. He has insisted that the tax cuts will generate jobs. However, the opposite has occurred, with some three million jobs lost to Americans since. In the last quarter of 2003 some nine million Americans were unemployed. The US economy, however, has managed to generate only some 221,000 new jobs per month since the Bush tax cuts took effect in 2002.
Bush and his administration have moved aggressively in other areas in an effort to make up for the budget deficit without recalling the tax cuts. These areas have included social security and veterans’ benefits, among others
Despite this sorry record, Bush has so far raised $130 million in campaign funds. The Bush-Cheney target is to raise $200 million, and they’re likely to get it through the support of the corporations that have most benefited from the Bush policies of war abroad and tax cuts at home.
It is also doubtful that Bush’s record will matter enough in November to elect Kerry. So far Bush still enjoys majority support, generated no doubt by his having tapped into the well-springs of jingoism and racism in the American psyche, which puts a premium on US demonstrations of supremacy abroad—my country right or wrong–against “chicken shit” countries like Iraq, and regards government assistance to the less privileged at home as forms of coddling the indolent.
By instinct as well as origins aware of what the US mainstream—i.e., Middle America with its anti-intellectual, the rest of the world be damned traditions—wants, Bush has thus questioned the patriotism of Kerry, his likely opponent, despite Kerry’s being a be-medalled Vietnam war veteran. Bush has initially focused on Kerry’s 1970s statements after his tour of duty in Vietnam that US troops had committed atrocities against Vietnamese civilians by torching their villages and torturing and killing them. Although a vast amount of research tends to confirm Kerry’s statements—one of the more recent findings is that there were hundreds of other incidents like My Lai, in which a unit of US Marines burned that village and killed most of its inhabitants during the Vietnam war—being accused of not being patriotic enough is in the US a sin sufficiently mortal cost anyone any election if it sticks.
While Kerry has focused on his military experience to prove his patriotic credentials and to argue that he rather than the draft-evading Bush (who managed to serve out the war in the Texas Air National Guard thanks to his connections, but whose service record there has been questioned) is more familiar with national security issues and how to address them.
Kerry has also outlined a broad platform of eliminating the deficit by removing tax cuts for the rich, providing more jobs by pressuring other countries into implementing international labor standards, and allowing poor high school graduates the opportunity to go to college through a federal program of service to their communities.
The Kerry program should logically attract voters, by addressing the plight of the unemployed and the high cost of college education among others, even as he has argued that US interests can be better protected abroad through diplomacy and multilateral cooperation rather than war.
While US elections do seem to be driven by policy issues, however, there are at least two factors that can work against Kerry this November. The first is the patriotism issue, which strikes a resonant chord in the hearts of the rednecks, gun nut organizations, right-wing churches and other groups that supported Bush in 2000 and for whom the very word “liberal”—which Kerry is perceived to be—is a bad word. The second is the corporate media, much of which has supported Bush’s war to consolidate US supremacy abroad. Their reporting can make the difference between being perceived as reasonable and sane or wildly radical.
Oddly enough, Bush is trying to be perceived as the former, and will likely portray Kerry the Vietnam veteran not only as unpatriotic but also as a fire-breathing, anti-poor radical. Whether he succeeds or not, and whether Kerry manages to get his message across will mostly depend on the US media.
Will a President Kerry make any difference? It should. Another four years of Bush, for the rest of the planet including the Philippines, will most likely mean four years of the same instability and insecurity that the world has seen since last year. Among the possibilities in this neck of the woods: the return of US military bases as predicted by the US think tank Stratfor, before Bush relinquishes the presidency in 2008.
At the very least a Kerry presidency could mean a respite, no matter how brief, from the bullying tactics that the browbeating Bush government has been using to force the world to the US will. No one should be counting on the Democratic Party to be any less committed to US interests. But a Democratic Party administration would at least be subtler in the means it would adopt to achieve the same ends. Unfortunately, the world is not likely to have even that for consolation come November.
(Today/abs-cbnNEWS.com, March 2, 2004)