Teresa Kerry: Ohio conspiracy?
Teresa Heinz Kerry’s recent outburst has set me to reminiscing a little about the heady and often hysterical election campaign that gripped America – and in truth, most of the world – last autumn.
At a Democratic fundraiser in Seattle, the Mozambique-born heiress denounced the results of the Ohio polls, pointing out that the optical scanning machines used to tabulate votes were manufactured by companies owned by “hard right Republicans”. In lieu of the fact that a mere 60,000-vote swing in that state could have secured the presidency for her husband, Mrs Kerry suggests that fraudulent and criminal behaviour could well have determined the outcome.
She may well have a point. As well documented by the investigative journalist Greg Palast, amongst others, in the 2000 election Republican operatives used a number of underhand, illegal, and often ingenious ruses to secure the necessary votes. Most notoriously was the wrongful disenfranchisement of tens of thousands of Black and Hispanic voters in traditionally Democrat-voting districts in Florida, at the behest of Governor Jeb Bush and Secretary of State Katherine Harris. With this precedent, and in an election that was contested in a spirit of degenerative brutality and viciousness, it is easy to surmise that dirty tricks were again at play.
However, with the benefit of a few months hindsight, we have to ask ourselves: under the circumstances, would we have wanted a John Kerry presidency? The 60,000 division in Ohio masks the broader, nationwide picture. Thanks to the quirks of the U.S. electoral college system, although a relative handful of votes could have given Kerry the crucial win, in the popular vote he trailed George Bush by some 3.5 million votes. Had he become President in such fashion he would have lacked anything approaching legitimacy or a workable mandate. Add to that a Republican-dominated Congress and the hostility of media attack dogs such as Rush Limbaugh and Bill O’Reilly; it is hard to envisage that Kerry would have been able to impose much, if any, of his plans for the country.
Speaking of which, what exactly were his plans? Little over four months after the election, and I can barely remember what Kerry stood for, even if I ever understood in the first place. Now, John Kerry is a man of principle and intelligence: his spirited stand against the Vietnam War following his tour of duty, and his probing investigations into the Iran-contra affair in the mid-80s, clearly demonstrate this. He is also an excellent debater, as he showed in his mis-matched tussles with George Bush. But all of his good qualities were muddied and confused when it came to fighting for the presidency. Fear dominated his campaign from start to finish: the fear of being seen as weak on terrorism; the fear of being out of touch with the people; the fear of that most potent of slurs, ‘liberal’. Thus, instead of setting his stall against the war on Iraq, Kerry prevaricated and pontificated until, eventually, his policy was drowned in a sea of contradictory euphemisms. Kerry then ludicrously had himself photographed going hunting, yet this clashed with the images of him kite-surfing on his summer vacation. In press conferences and campaign rallies, he and his running mate John Edwards vouched to ‘hunt and kill’ those who sought to harm America. Did they seriously think this empty macho posturing was going to convince anybody? None of these stunts reflected honestly upon Kerry as a person, and their vapid emptiness looks all the more cynically obvious in hindsight. They demonstrated how successfully the Republicans have dictated the margins within which mainstream politics operates: the concern within Kerry’s camp was that to stray too far risked political annihilation.
When it came to the crunch, Kerry turned out to be the wrong candidate for the wrong time. What the Democrats needed – as evinced by Howard Dean’s brief but fiery presidential campaign – was a clear message, distinct from the brand of fundamental conservatism proffered by the Republicans: instead of being drawn further to the right, thus losing many of the unique progressive values that galvanise people to vote Democrat in the first place, they needed a candidate who would stand his own ground and carve out a vision bolstered by traditional Democratic values.
Fortunately, with Kerry’s defeat and the serious congressional losses sustained last November, it seems that a corner has been turned. The guidance of the Democratic Leadership Council – the body that fuelled the rise of Bill Clinton, and advocated a pragmatic third-way triangulation as an electoral strategy – looks to have run its course. Howard Dean’s campaign to be president may have faltered, but he is now installed as chair of the Democratic National Committee. Hopefully he will manage to instil within the party his values and beliefs, which as his presidential campaign showed have a potentially huge base of grassroots public support, and set about the mammoth task of unseating the current Republican hegemony.
At a Democratic fundraiser in Seattle, the Mozambique-born heiress denounced the results of the Ohio polls, pointing out that the optical scanning machines used to tabulate votes were manufactured by companies owned by “hard right Republicans”. In lieu of the fact that a mere 60,000-vote swing in that state could have secured the presidency for her husband, Mrs Kerry suggests that fraudulent and criminal behaviour could well have determined the outcome.
She may well have a point. As well documented by the investigative journalist Greg Palast, amongst others, in the 2000 election Republican operatives used a number of underhand, illegal, and often ingenious ruses to secure the necessary votes. Most notoriously was the wrongful disenfranchisement of tens of thousands of Black and Hispanic voters in traditionally Democrat-voting districts in Florida, at the behest of Governor Jeb Bush and Secretary of State Katherine Harris. With this precedent, and in an election that was contested in a spirit of degenerative brutality and viciousness, it is easy to surmise that dirty tricks were again at play.
However, with the benefit of a few months hindsight, we have to ask ourselves: under the circumstances, would we have wanted a John Kerry presidency? The 60,000 division in Ohio masks the broader, nationwide picture. Thanks to the quirks of the U.S. electoral college system, although a relative handful of votes could have given Kerry the crucial win, in the popular vote he trailed George Bush by some 3.5 million votes. Had he become President in such fashion he would have lacked anything approaching legitimacy or a workable mandate. Add to that a Republican-dominated Congress and the hostility of media attack dogs such as Rush Limbaugh and Bill O’Reilly; it is hard to envisage that Kerry would have been able to impose much, if any, of his plans for the country.
Speaking of which, what exactly were his plans? Little over four months after the election, and I can barely remember what Kerry stood for, even if I ever understood in the first place. Now, John Kerry is a man of principle and intelligence: his spirited stand against the Vietnam War following his tour of duty, and his probing investigations into the Iran-contra affair in the mid-80s, clearly demonstrate this. He is also an excellent debater, as he showed in his mis-matched tussles with George Bush. But all of his good qualities were muddied and confused when it came to fighting for the presidency. Fear dominated his campaign from start to finish: the fear of being seen as weak on terrorism; the fear of being out of touch with the people; the fear of that most potent of slurs, ‘liberal’. Thus, instead of setting his stall against the war on Iraq, Kerry prevaricated and pontificated until, eventually, his policy was drowned in a sea of contradictory euphemisms. Kerry then ludicrously had himself photographed going hunting, yet this clashed with the images of him kite-surfing on his summer vacation. In press conferences and campaign rallies, he and his running mate John Edwards vouched to ‘hunt and kill’ those who sought to harm America. Did they seriously think this empty macho posturing was going to convince anybody? None of these stunts reflected honestly upon Kerry as a person, and their vapid emptiness looks all the more cynically obvious in hindsight. They demonstrated how successfully the Republicans have dictated the margins within which mainstream politics operates: the concern within Kerry’s camp was that to stray too far risked political annihilation.
When it came to the crunch, Kerry turned out to be the wrong candidate for the wrong time. What the Democrats needed – as evinced by Howard Dean’s brief but fiery presidential campaign – was a clear message, distinct from the brand of fundamental conservatism proffered by the Republicans: instead of being drawn further to the right, thus losing many of the unique progressive values that galvanise people to vote Democrat in the first place, they needed a candidate who would stand his own ground and carve out a vision bolstered by traditional Democratic values.
Fortunately, with Kerry’s defeat and the serious congressional losses sustained last November, it seems that a corner has been turned. The guidance of the Democratic Leadership Council – the body that fuelled the rise of Bill Clinton, and advocated a pragmatic third-way triangulation as an electoral strategy – looks to have run its course. Howard Dean’s campaign to be president may have faltered, but he is now installed as chair of the Democratic National Committee. Hopefully he will manage to instil within the party his values and beliefs, which as his presidential campaign showed have a potentially huge base of grassroots public support, and set about the mammoth task of unseating the current Republican hegemony.
posted by DN at 11:53 AM
1 Comments:
damn son, you really got it goin' on! i had been consoling myself with the knowledge that the W. is going to fuuck the shit up so bad that the US might actually wake up and turn itself around, but your description of Kerry's insipid vacilating closed the coffin on the Democrat comeback that never was - and probably for the best. let's just hope that the Shrub can screw it up badly enough for the masses to know that Republicans are knuckleheads within doing Too much irreparable damage...
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