UK Guardian: Americans choose between Bush and Bush lite

[ikojo]

I don't know if this has been posted anywhere or if this is the proper forum but here it is...why do we need to go to the foreign press for analysis of US politics?


Published on Tuesday, August 19, 2003 by the Guardian / UK
American Voters Have Two Choices: Bush or Bush-lite
by Hugo Young

The oldest saw in modern politics is that elections are won only on the centre ground. Extremists have to abandon, or at any rate disguise, their passions, and move to positions as close to being all things to all fickle voters as they can invent. That's how Tony Blair made Labour electable. The coalitions of continental Europe are built round the same inescapable proposition. In such politics, nuance replaces conviction, and manoeuvre boldness, as the identifying marks of a winning team.

-snip-

This is a hard-right administration offering virtually no concessions to the soothing niceties that might make it more electorally attractive to voters who are not Republicans. Its tax policy is grotesquely loaded against the masses and in favour of the rich. Its bias on the environment unfailingly comes out on the side of the big commercial interests. It is daily tearing up tracts of policy and practice that protected the basic rights of people snared in the justice system. It is the hardest right administration since Herbert Hoover's from a very different era. And, which is the point, delights in being so. There is no apology or cover-up.

-snip-

...Unlike Bush, many Democrats are sticking to the conventional wisdom. They grope for some kind of centre ground. But so far has the territory shifted, thanks to the Republicans' shameless stakeout on the hard right, that their quest continues to drain their party of most of its meaning and any of its capacity to inspire.

-snip-

For one thing, many Democrats seem to have forgotten that they did win the election last time. For four years it has been idle to challenge the Florida vote and the bizarre workings of the electoral college, but now is the time to recall that in 2000 half a million more Americans voted for Al Gore's progressive version of the future than Bush's more conservative one. Bush was still posing as a bit centrist then, and Gore was scarcely a raving liberal. Gore mostly stuck to the Clinton third way doctrine that had taken the Democrats away from the narrowest version of their past. But there was a left-right choice, and more Americans voted left than right.

-snip-

For any Democrat to take advantage of Bush's waning popularity and overcome his vast campaign finances, however, he must have something to say. There needs to be some clarity, on all fronts. The other day, the same edition of the New York Times carried stories saying that neither young African-Americans nor the Boston Irish could any longer be counted on as part of the core vote. Is this heresy surprising when nobody knows with any certainty what Democrats stand for? If a party can't fire up its core vote, it will be deader quicker than if it can't draw in people who've never voted for it before. Watching what Bush has done to both the economy and the constitution, it should be easy for a Democrat to come up with soundbites and articles of simple faith to inspire a few more than the millions of Americans who voted for Gore last time.

-snip-

Wiseacres continue to pretend otherwise. They think Howard Dean, the most lefty of the candidates, and former governor of the state of Vermont, could never get elected. Transfixed by the attractions of triangulated centrism, they're prepared to have its geometry laid out exclusively by their opponents. They come out against a bit of the Bush tax plan but not all of it. They're all but silent, as are much of the media, on what anti-terrorism psychosis is doing to civil liberties.

[wryter2000]

1. Great analysis

How come the Manchester Guardian understands better than the DLC?