Chilton Williamson, June 2008
fter eighteen months of the most longest and most grueling nominating races in American electoral history, the people—so it is said—have spoken. The country now has two presumptive candidates set to challenge each other for the presidency in November. Both of these are political hacks and personal nonentities painstakingly selected over a period of a year and a half from the murkiest pool of prospective nominees ever fielded by the two national parties.
Nothing of what has happened within either primary sequence makes the slightest political sense. The Democrats have virtually torn themselves apart fighting over two candidates who agree implicitly on every issue large or small, to the extent that they have been compelled, strictly for tactical advantage, to create the mere impression of disagreement. The Republicans, bored by and suspicious of an assortment of dispiriting candidates with no obvious credentials to back their lofty ambitions, have chosen by default ( and with the help of millions of independent voters) the once-scorned underdog in the race, for no better reason apparently than that he happens to be already a Beltway fixture—and never mind that he is also a party maverick and nominal Republican, reliably reported to have considered switching his party affiliation to the Democrats. Even should he succeed in defeating Barack Obama, a McCain administration to succeed George W. Bush’s two terms would hardly be a satisfactory fulfillment of Karl Rove’s plan for an unshakeable Republican reich lasting for decades to come. (A party switch in mid-term by the president of the United States seems entirely in character for so unpredictable and unsettled a character as John McCain.)
Despite the Democrats’ fierce determination to take the White House in November, their protracted primary battle was driven much less by hard-edged political considerations than by egoism and personal self-indulgence, beginning with the candidates themselves and extending downward through their staffs and supporters. Never has selfish political ambition been more evident at the top, or the cult of personality so strong among the rank-and-file, than in the Clinton and Obama campaigns over last winter and spring. In both cases, the personal element was encouraged and abetted by the national publicity apparatus that has come to dominate American politics to an extent greater still than do the news media. The media, with their demand for politics as entertainment, were damaging enough to a democratic system, but the omnipresent publicity network that has overtaken them threatens to wreck democracy for good and all. The media insist upon the appearance at least of substantive political debate; publicity, catering to personal vanity, craves image, symbol, and vicarious emotional involvement with its subjects. For the publicity machine, the Clinton-Obama race was made to order: the first woman candidate for president opposing the first black one. Sex and race, and race versus sex, were the real motivating concerns, ensuring the delicious spectacle of a Democratic primary race that was indeed, as the two candidates and their allies charged, an exercise in both racism and sexism—an achievement not even the Goldwater and Reagan campaigns ever managed to pull off. One might almost have thought, watching the drama unfold, that nominating the first woman, or the first black, for the presidency amounts to a platform of itself. But of course it doesn’t. What the campaigns did amount to was pitting--very publicly--one liberal victim group against another, with results that were altogether chaotic, and entirely predictable.
The upshot of this primary season is that the Republicans are preparing to nominate a Democrat in Minneapolis, the Democrats a black man in Denver. How this comports with the competitive institutional role the two major American political parties are intended to perform is not immediately obvious.
The American party system is supposed to be about “choice.” But what choice can there be when the electorate no longer knows what party stands for (or against) what, or on what grounds the candidate was nominated, besides sexual or racial identity—or, as in the case of McCain, other than by default? As I write, Barack Obama is preparing to make a two-week tour of Republicanland, in an attempt to convert red-state voters to the Democratic Party next fall. What is the case he expects to make to his audiences: That John McCain, by supporting the Iraq war and tax reduction, is something less than a simon-pure Democratic candidate who doesn’t deserve the votes of cloth-coat Republicans? Obama will leave his hearers scratching their heads until well past election day.
Unless the voters adhere in November to more or less strict partisan voting for the sake of party loyalty, the electoral results in the coming presidential election are certain to bemuse psephologists for years to come. Independents, who effectively delivered the GOP nomination to McCain, will likely remain with him. Blue-collar Democrats, recognizing that McCain is really a Democrat with a trunk and wide ears, may well be inclined to vote for this white elephant. Disaffected feminists and female voters of a certain age, resentful of Obama’s ousting of Clinton from the nominative spot and perceiving that McCain is no conservative, could drift as well toward the GOP candidate. “Moderate” Republicans—and neoconservatives--will happily vote for the Republican nominee, while evangelicals and conservative Republicans might sit out Election Day, or either vote for or write in Ron Paul. One way or the other, the 2008 election is shaping up to be the most party-scrambled contest in memory, owing to the presence of a male Oprah Winfrey at the head of the Democratic ticket and a closet Democrat leading the Republican one.
The American two-party system has worked reasonably well--that is to say, it has run fairly smoothly—so long as the American public believed it was being presented with candidates who offered clear choices, no matter that those choices were largely bogus ones. It remains to be seen what happens when voters perceive no choice or clarity but rather confusion and obliquity, added to the commonplace procession of campaign-season lies. ###
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Chilton Williamson, Jr.