WILLIAM MARVEL
January 25, 2004 - On Tuesday New Hampshire voters will play their part in a political exercise that is designed to boil every presidential contest down to the two most insincere candidates.
As the past four incumbents have proven, the presidency now usually goes to the man who can either on his own or through a competent team of image-makers most convincingly misrepresent himself to the American people. Ronald Reagan was a professional actor with a selectively poor memory, George H. W. Bush lied outright about his knowledge of the Iran-Contra chicanery and Bill Clinton bequeathed Republicans the opportunity to point out that Republicans are not the only liars. Now we have the Great Pretender, who uses national tragedies and false information to justify preconceived international aggression.
The would-be president learns early that dishonesty is a valuable asset, for the most important function of the successful candidate is to portray a reformer without offering any actual reforms.
We are currently engaged in a quadrennial charade that purports to offer the American people the chance to change their leadership peacefully. Elections are supposed to distinguish us from the banana republics and Balkan provinces where government evolves only at the point of a gun. For all practical purposes, however, the American presidential campaign is a fraud designed to assure, as much as possible, that we see no change at all, and that the corporate few continue dominating our economy and our personal fates, no matter who occupies the White House.
Although they sometimes fail to operate correctly, the primaries are carefully engineered to discourage change. The earliest of them are held in traditionally conservative states, where progressive candidates are sure to fare poorly and can often be depended on to drop out for lack of funds. In the Iowa caucuses, for instance, those who do not secure a 15-percent following are not even considered, giving disproportionate attention to conservative, mainstream aspirants with plenty of financial backing.
Throughout the primaries, both party organizations offer their collective support to those candidates who most closely toe the party line, and corporate influence helps to assure that the Democratic and Republican party lines do not vary appreciably from each other. The two-party system has so thoroughly barred the rise of reformers and renegades that it has become essentially a one-party system, in which the ultimate choice always lies between a conservative candidate and a more conservative candidate.
The Democratic primary offers a good example. Most Democrats seem to agree that it is crucial to get George Bush out of office, and many have told me that they would back anyone who could beat him. As usual, though, there is a perception that in order to beat a Republican one must essentially disguise oneself as a Republican.
Many Democratic voters with liberal viewpoints will therefore give their earliest support to the most conservative candidates. By so doing, they will misrepresent the true flavor of the average voter, and they assure us another contest between conservatives that leaves no real choice at all. The party will then abandon, once more, its traditional core of social and political liberals, many of whom may again bolt the fold and vote their conscience for a sincere third-party candidate.
If change is so badly needed, then voters should vote for change rather than for the status quo.
If we need a president who would not have thrown us into an unnecessary war on the basis of cooked intelligence, then we do not need John Kerry.
If we need truly different health care reform that will benefit the consumer rather than the insurance and pharmaceutical companies, then we need someone besides Howard Dean.
If we wish to arrest the flow of fundamentalist religious moralizing from the White House, then we have no use for Joe Lieberman.
No candidate in the primary process has articulated a more comprehensive menu of populist reform than Dennis Kucinich, yet he has the least visibility and the fewest votes of any major Democratic contender. He delivers an appealing and convincing message, but party adherents seem so concerned with ultimate victory that they stifle their own preferences: Kucinich is generally dismissed with the remark that "he's good, and I like him, but he cant win."
Primaries should reveal the heart of a political party, and the Democratic Party will never recover an independent, reasonably liberal stance if its followers ignore their consciences and instinctively gravitate to that champion who most closely emulates their worst enemy.
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