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Super Tuesday

by Kevin Carey

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KEVIN CAREY urges votes for Bush and Gore on Super Tuesday and prays for the eventual triumph of the Democratic Presidential candidate.

When the American political cycle is more predictable than its climate there is something wrong with both. It is easy enough to see that 22 inches of snow in Raleigh, North Carolina, in a single day must be classified as an iconic manifestation of unpredictability. At the same time, the political weather followed a familiar course. The primaries opened with all four major candidates attacking 'insider' Washington politics; coming from two Senators, a Vice President and the son of a President this was despicable enough to disqualify all four on the simple ground of humbug.

Inevitably, too, there were noises from the poorer candidates in favour of reforms in electoral finance. Equally marked and familiar was the peculiar geometry of electoral politics which forces primary candidates to the extreme of their Parties before they are forced back to the centre for the election proper. Finally - and this is the point of an outsider - there was a depressing degree of silence on foreign policy.

It is easy enough to over-estimate the importance of which Party the President belongs to - judging on actions rather than words there hasn't been an extreme occupant of the White House since Coolidge - but this does matter in the context of the whole governing and legislative process.

The power of big business is so great in the United States that Republican control of Congress and the White House would be an unmitigated disaster. It would be even worse than the gridlock of the 1990s which has made the world's greatest power more or less ungovernable. With a budget surplus and stunning social inequalities the best outcome would be a Democratic Congress and a moderate Republican President but as neither of these two components looks likely the next best option must be a moderate Democrat President and whatever Congress turns up.

Looking at the candidates, there is not much to choose between Bush and McCain in terms of policy, neither having very much and what they have being, on balance, unpleasant --- but the Arizona Senator is more personable and photogenic, though, given the neural power of President Reagan that is hardly a recommendation in itself, and Bush is more open to ridicule because more is expected of a President's son.

Sadly for the whole process, Bush is not egregiously more stupid than his rivals. Only Gore has anything like an intellect and, ominously for the whole system, this may well count against him though it is the only one of two major attributes of importance that put him above Bradley, the other being experience.

The temporary adulation of McCain has largely arisen because he has added an element of chance to an otherwise quintessentially tedious process; the predictability of Convention outcomes as early as January makes the whole primaries superstructure overblown even beyond the notorious penchant of our current age for style over substance.

So beware McCain; he should not be judged superior to Bush just because he has added a bit of excitement and a teligenic physiognomy. On the other side, one can only hope that the mindless inverted snobbery that penalises Gore for being both decent and clever will not prevail.

What worries outsiders and should worry Americans more than it apparently does is the way that the system fails to produce worthy Presidential contenders. There is not much point waxing nostalgic for Adlai Stevenson; he lost; twice. Then there was Eugene McCarthy; he lost too; and there was Humphrey. Carter won as a consequence of Watergate then lost to a man I wouldn't have entrusted with the charge of my local cricket club.

Incidentally, the Editor would welcome a theoretical underpinning for the obvious conclusion from this brief analysis that where politicians aspiring to the Presidency have any intellect at all they are almost invariably Democrats. He would also welcome suggestions as to the name of the last Republican Presidential candidate who might, as loosely as you like, be termed "intellectual".

Another distressing feature of Presidential campaigns is the almost total lack of any discussion of policies or ideas; forget "the vision thing", most contenders don't even have a blueprint thing, or even a bag of things.

We do wish that the obviously morally important issue of abortion could be joined, for instance, by a debate about the morality of the death penalty. It ought not, either, to be too much to ask for a debate about the morality of military intervention in foreign lands. No matter how disastrous the intervention in Somalia, did that justify the morally bankrupt PDD25 which forbids intervention on any ground other than the national interest of the United States?

There are clearly two sides to the debate on abortion but there can be no dispute that this Directive directly resulted in the needless slaughter of thousands of innocent people in Rwanda*.

On the basis that what I am asking for is far too high minded to be realistic, would it be too much to ask for a sensible debate on the creation and distribution of income and wealth and the purposes for which a civil state and an economy exist?

It is distressing that the socially and economically excluded have concluded, through failure to register, that they hope for nothing from politics. They are correct.

Had the Clinton Health Bill been presented to Congress by the Archangel Gabriel himself it would have been thrown out; Hillary Clinton as the messenger was simply an excuse for throwing out the message.

Plutocratic control of the mass media rules out anything but an hysterical response to any proposal, no matter how modest, to alleviate the lot of the poor by making demands on the rich that they would not notice in practice no matter what theoretical objections they might advance as a disguise for corporate selfishness. I find it very hard to take seriously the pronouncements on how much tax we should pay and how much wealth we can redistribute from international companies and their owners who pay no tax at all.

Whatever happens this Super Tuesday I reluctantly urge votes for Bush and Gore and will then pray fervently for a Democrat victory in November.

*Discussion of Presidential Decision Directive 25, issued March 1994, enacted May 1994 discussed by Romeo Dallaire in: Moore, Jonathan (ed): Hard Choices: Moral Dilemmas in Humanitarian Intervention, Rowman & Littlefield, 1998 ISBN 0 8476 9031 8.

KEVIN CAREY is social entrepreneur, economist and Director of the UK's humanITy. He can be reached via e-mail at "humanity@atlas.co.uk".

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