Okay. Bill Bradley and John McCain have both withdrawn from the presidential race. What’s more, Bradley has thrown his support behind Al Gore. So we’re left with Gore and Bush–one of whom will be our president beginning in January 2001. Now, I’d just like to say…it’s March 22nd. The election isn’t until November. The conventions aren’t until August. What the fuck is wrong with this country???
Think about it. On the one hand, most observers have known since 1998 that the nominees almost certainly would be Bush and Gore, if for no other reason than the size of their war chests. On the other, we now have seven months–SEVEN MONTHS–of media horse-race politics, endless sniping, and a mad dash to the center while ignoring most substantive issues. Both of these things are really fucked up, and it honestly makes me pretty mad. I’m sorry; I don’t think we can call our system a representative democracy any more, in any fashion but the most nominative and symbolic.
The rules are simple–if you have the most money, and you have the support of the leadership of one of the two major parties, you have a chance to be president. Otherwise, no chance at all.
It doesn’t matter if, like Bush, you were a C student in college, your political past is littered with instances of patronage and favor-dealing, and your two greatest accomplishments are being the son of a former president and governor of a state whose constitution vests the executive with less power than almost anywhere else in the union. And it doesn’t matter if, like Gore, you trumpet environmentalism while filling your coffers with corporate money, you’re anointed your party’s nominee so early that your stance on actual issues is largely unimportant, and your two greates accomplishments are being the son of a former senator and vice-president to a man whose administration embodied pandering, poll-driven centrism. No, so long as you’ve got the cash and the royal seal of approval (one of which often begets the other), you can be the nominee. Otherwise, you’re just plumb out of luck.
Y’know, I would have voted for Bill Bradley, maybe. He wasn’t perfect, but he was as close to a progressive as we had in the field, and he had Paul Wellstone’s backing. I would have even voted for McCain. Sure, he’s far to the right of me on most issues, but he’s committed to campaign finance reform, and perhaps being the opposition party would revitalize Congressional Democrats (whose collective liberalism settled into complacent indolence as soon as Clinton gained office). I would have campaigned for Warren Beatty. Laugh if you want, but he’s a genuine progressive who’s shown vision and intelligence lacking in many of our politicians. Hell, I would have been interested to see what kind of candidate Elizabeth Dole was! Her poll numbers weren’t that bad, and maybe if she’d lasted till the primaries I could actually have figured out where she stood on the issues. But because she couldn’t raise enough money to compete with Bush, her campaign was over before the campaigning even started.
So instead, in this grandest of democracies, there are now two candidates who have any chance at all of winning election seven months from now, and I get to exercise my constitutional right to choose between them. Never mind that two-thirds of the states hadn’t even held their primaries before the party nominees were decided; to choose between two rich, white men with whom I disagree in almost every area, and neither of whom are very likely to focus on certain problems–hunger, homelessness, concentration of media, the perils of globalization, the increasing income gap, poorly funded schools, structural urban poverty–which will harm or continue to harm millions of Americans in the coming years…is it really any wonder that people don’t vote more?
I think it’s a corrupted system, I really do. There’s nothing sinister about it, no conspiracy–but our government is, as someone put it, “by the comfortable, of the comfortable, and for the comfortable.” And where’s the democracy in that? Hell, I hear Pat Buchanan–Pat Buchanan, for Chrissakes!–railing about the two-party monopoly of esconced interests in Washington, of an institutional structure interested solely in perpetuating the status quo, and I find myself agreeing with him. He may be a racist, isolationist, protectionist, and borderline fascist, but the man has a valid point.
Look, we’re the most prosperous nation in the world. Our citizens have a combination of liberties and material wealth afforded to those in few other countries, and we have economic, political, and military power which is absolutely unparalleled. But it doesn’t mean things are as good as they can be, and it doesn’t mean things can’t get worse. For that matter, it doesn’t mean that things aren’t already worse, economic “boom” notwithstanding, for many, many, many people within our borders. Those who don’t have lobbyists, don’t hold stock options, don’t drive SUVs, are living paycheck to paycheck. If this is their government, too, then why does hardly anything get better? I don’t want to have to choose between Gore and Bush, two mediocre men with superlative pedigrees, and I resent the hell out of the fact that this choice is trumpeted as the pinnacle of freedom and democracy. We’ve got seven more months…are we really so satisfied with our choices of challengers that we can put down our pencils before time’s run out?
Just had to get that off my chest.
