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Monday, September 8,
2008
The U.S. 2008
Presidential Election: An Evaluation
"Bomb, bomb, bomb Iran."
"The
issue of economics is not something I've understood as well as I should.. ... I
know a lot less about economics than I do about military and foreign policy
issues. I still need to be educated."
“I think that [to be
rich] if you are only talking about income, how about $5 million?”
John
McCain, 2008 Republican presidential candidate
"Our national
leaders are sending them [American soldiers to Iraq] out on a task that is from
God. ...That's what we have to make sure that we're praying for, that there is
a plan and that plan is God's plan."
Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin
(June 2008)
"She's
not prepared to be governor. How can she be prepared to be vice president or
president? Look at what she's done to this state. What would she do to the
nation?”
[About Gov. Sarah Palin, McCain's choice for a running mate]
Lyda Green, Republican
Alaska State Senate President
“If
my guesses are confirmed, then that raises the suspicion that somebody in the
U. S. purposefully created this conflict [the August 7-8 Georgia-Russia conflict] with
the aim of aggravating the situation and creating an advantage...for one of the
candidates in the battle for the post of U.S. president.”
Vladimir
Putin, Russian Prime Minister and former President (August 28, 2008)
Tradionally, American presidential
elections get into full gear after
Labor Day, once the political conventions have been completed, major
speeches made and vice president running mates chosen. It is therefore a good
time to make a general assessment of where this year's election stands, what
political camp has the momentum (or is losing it) and what good or bad
decisions have been made by either of the two major presidential candidates.
1. Let us start
with the polls.
Three months
ago, in mid June, at the end of the primary season, here was the standing in
the polls of the two then presumptive main presidential candidates. The polls
at that time showed Democratic candidate Sen. Barack Obama leading
his Republican opponent Sen. John McCain
by a comfortable margin. This was on the aftermath of Obama's primary victory
over Sen. Hillary Clinton. For instance, the USA Today/Gallup typically showed
Sen. Obama leading Sen. McCain on the order of 50% to 44%, among likely voters.
In late August, according to the
same USA Today/Gallup Poll, Sen. Obama still had a 48%–45% edge over his
opponent among likely voters, but a few other polls showed him trailing McCain.
A Saturday September 6 Gallup poll showed Obama leading McCain only by 47% to
45%, indicating that the two presidential tickets were statistically neck and
neck after the two parties' back-to-back conventions.
It should be
mentioned that 10 times out of 12, the presidential ticket ahead after the
conventions wins in November. But this year, poll data have to be analyzed in
light of a likely negative “Bradley
Effect” for
the Obama-Biden ticket (see
below).
Therefore, the
conclusion is clear: This is going to be a close U.S. presidential election,
much closer than it should have been expected after eight years of crisis-prone
Republican rule. Why is this so?
2. The Attacks
on the Persona of the Democratic Candidate
It is generally
recognized that if Americans
elect Sen.
Barack Obama president,
it will be considered some sort of a political miracle. This is because Sen.
Obama is not your usual American presidential candidate. A junior U.S. senator
with little administrative experience, he has to counteract the charge that he
is inexperienced and untested. Not that his adversary, Sen. John McCain, has
had much more administrative experience, but being younger, it is assumed that
Sen. Obama is less experienced. Because of that, his choice of
vice-presidential running mate was crucial. This was a test he could not afford
to fail (see below).
Sen. Obama is
also the first person of African-American ancestry to run as a presidential
candidate for one of the two dominant American political parties. This in
itself is an historical challenge since he does not fit totally with the image
that many Americans have of their president. Indeed, it was said by some
observers that some segments of the American public are not completely
comfortable with candidate Obama and his convoluted personal history.
More
importantly, perhaps, is the fact that Sen. Obama is considered a progressive
and on the left of many domestic policy issues. This may be less of a handicap
with the average American voter, who has suffered miserably under the rule of
far right politicians, than it is with the neoconservative nomenklatura who
control the levers of many propaganda machines.
As with previous
democratic presidential candidates of the recent past, it should have been
expected that the ruling political cartel in the U.S. would be less than
enthusiastic in allowing a relatively unknown and thus a somewhat more risky candidate get
into the White House. It is obvious that there is a strong coalition of various
interests that does not like the prospect of having Senator Obama become
President Obama, and they are taking the necessary steps to attempt to deny him
a victory.
For that, they
have adopted the traditional Republican strategy of “attack and
destroy.” The neocon propaganda
machine, which controls 90 percent of the American corporate
media, has already done an effective job of sabotaging the Obama campaign.
Indeed, the mainstream network talking heads, cable paid demagogues and other smear
artists have savaged him ferociously with innuendos, half-truths
and calumnies in order to distance him from the average voter, whose interests
Sen. Obama has espoused.
It is obvious
that this powerful propaganda machine is bent on electing a neocon and pro-military-industrial
complex candidate, no matter how flawed and unfit that candidate
may be, and so far they have used their considerable resources, including those
of nonprofit 501(c)4
organizations, to attain that goal. That flawed candidate
himself, Sen. John McCain
has reached new lows in dirty campaigning, in smears and in political lies,
even stooping as low as to accuse Sen. Obama of being responsible for high gas
prices, while exonerating as culprits the incumbent Bush-Cheney administration,
its ineffective energy policy and its wars of aggression.
3. The Obama
Camp's Weak Response
But the
Republican “ad hominen” attack strategy was predictable, since they have used it
before with success, and the Obama camp should have planned in accordance. It
is said that candidate Obama “conceded” the crucial month of August
to his adversaries. This is the same month that Democratic presidential
candidates Michael Dukakis and John Kerry are also said to have conceded to
their attackers during the 1988 and 2004 campaigns. Therefore, the fact that
Sen. Obama remained on the defensive and did not strongly counterattack goes a
long way in explaining his current lack of political momentum. To win, the
Democrats cannot let the corrosive propaganda against them go unanswered, with
only sporadic and weak rebuttals,
while their opponent's flawed record and character remain largely
off screen.
Since this is a
mistake made by the Dukakis camp in 1988 and the Kerry camp in 2004, one would
think that the Democrats would have learned from these two fiascos. But judging
from what happened in August this year, it's obvious that they have not. A
question therefore must be raised: Is there an ongoing attempt from within the
Democratic Party to sabotage Obama's campaign? When something weird or
unexplained happens, one has to ask if there is not a more rational reason that
explains it.
4. The
Republican Bag of Dirty Tricks
This election
has been characterized so far by the McCain camp going deep into the bag of
political dirty tricks
to destroy the Democratic presidential candidate and derail his campaign. How
come the McCain machine has been so amazingly successful in controlling the
debate, especially in having foreign affairs and security issues dominate the
presidential election campaign, at a time when millions of Americans are losing
their homes, when the economy is going through one of the worst financial and banking
crisis and is in the midst of an economic slump?
As for the
question about the dominance of national security issues, it certainly can be
asked whether Sen. Barack Obama has not already been the victim of an astute
and wicked “Wag the
Dog” scheme.
Such a scheme could have been designed by the Bush-Cheney White House to place
foreign affairs and security matters front and center at a strategically
important time in the U.S. presidential campaign, in the month of August, in
order to bolster McCain's campaign and help candidate McCain capitalize on his
perceived advantage on such questions.
Indeed, the
curious international
crisis that McCain's personal friend Mikhail
Saakashvili, President of Georgia, created from scratch at the
outset of the 2008 Olympic Games, during the night of August 7-8 (a period when
Sen. Obama was taking a holiday in Hawaii) has all the appearances of a “Wag
the Dog”
operation.
Ever
since Western countries supported the break-away of the territory of Kosovo
from Serbia in February 2008, and created a precedent to be applied elsewhere,
Georgia's President Saakashvili
knew perfectly well that Russia was prepared to react to any provocation in
South Ossetia. Why then did the hothead Saakashvili go ahead and provoke Russia
by bombing and invading S. Ossetia? And with American and Israeli
“advisers” on the ground, in Georgia, we can rest assured that
Saakashvili would never have sent Georgian tanks to South Ossetia without
receiving some form of go-ahead signal from Washington. An ominous sign was the
presence of a top national security aide to Vice
President Dick Cheney in Georgia (Joseph R. Wood), just before
the latter country's August 7-8 attack on South Ossetia. Therefore, we can be
certain that there was a direct link between the Georgian government and the
Dick Cheney White House while George W. Bush was at the Beijing Olympics.
Many
consider that the hairy Georgian, Washington-backed plan to attack Russian
soldiers in S. Ossetia was “beyond comprehension”. But was it? Was
it intended, from Georgia's point of view, to draw the United States into a
newly created de facto
conflict with Russia, even thinking that the Georgian army could successfully
occupy S. Ossetia with Russian soldiers stationed there, as some observers
believed initially, or —was it not also, and this is more logical, part
of a plan designed to boost Sen. John McCain's campaign for the American
presidency, at a time when he was badly trailing
in the polls? It is permitted, indeed, to suspect that the
office of Vice President Cheney could have been interested in provoking a
dispute with Russia over NATO, in order to shift the political debate
in the U.S. away from the economy and more towards the issue of national
security and international affairs.
The fact that the Georgian military incursions into S. Ossetia were followed with ready-made declarations by candidate McCain (“We are all Georgians”) in the aftermath of this provoked and gratuitous crisis points to a possibly more cynical political scenario. —It is said that when something looks like a duck, walks like a duck and goes “Quack! Quack!” like a duck, there is a good chance that it's a duck. At the very least, this is a hypothesis which deserves to be investigated with all the available clues. It is also a hypothesis that has received support from Russian President