- The band pumped out brassy dance tunes, many dedicated
to the gritty urban realities of New York. A few couples in the black tie
and taffeta crowd found a space to dance, but most milled about in the
packed ballroom, gravitating towards the stage as they waited for the president.
-
- Republicans used to detest New York as a heaving pit
of liberalism, but since September 11 the city has become a patriotic icon.
This Republican fundraising gala was in a Washington hotel, but the imagery
was a pastiche of New York streetlife, complete with street signs and a
mock facade of the Yankees' stadium. The catering followed the same theme.
-
- These politically charged dinners are normally five-course
affairs eaten off white linen, but the folksiness of the Bush White House
has by now pervaded the Republican party. The menu on this night was hot
dogs and peanuts, served from food carts and eaten standing up.
-
- "I think it's great because I thinks folks would
rather be eating hot dogs with President Bush than sipping wine and nibbling
cheese with Hillary Clinton," declared George Allen, a Virginia senator.
-
- The president, who marched in to an ecstatic welcome,
offered rhetoric to match the humble fare. After vowing to persevere in
the battle against terrorism, he turned to his domestic ambitions, "to
work for a society of prosperity and compassion so that every single citizen
has a chance to work and succeed and realise the great promise of this
country".
-
- He promised to reach out to those Americans "who
seem hopelessly lost, some who hurt, some who are lonely".
-
- This is President Bush's trademark - language that was
once the preserve of black Baptist churches and Democratic party rallies.
-
- Populist
-
- But what is more extraordinary is his capacity to co-opt
the populist style of his adversaries at a time when the Republicans are
more than ever the party of extraordinary wealth.
-
- The men and women in the ballroom had paid a minimum
of $1,500 (£900) for their hot dogs, and almost all of them had contributed
much, much more. The single night brought the Republican party a total
of $14m. Mr Bush has so far raised $83m for his primary campaign, more
than all nine Democratic contenders put together, even though he does not
have an opponent inside his party.
-
- This financial superiority flows from the simple fact
that the president's backers are far wealthier than those of his rivals.
More of them give the maximum contribution to a presidential campaign of
$2,000, and more of them are chief executives who vie with each other to
become honoured Republican "Rangers" or "Pioneers",
by putting together $200,000 and $100,000 "bundles" of contributions
from their employees and friends.
-
- "You don't raise that kind of money at barbecues
and backyard sales. You raise it from big business," said Charles
Lewis, who runs the Washington watchdog the Centre for Public Integrity.
-
- The egalitarianism of the evening also stood in marked
contrast to the reality of contemporary America, which in hard economic
terms is a more divided and unequal country than at any time since the
"gilded age" of the late 19th century.
-
- The richest 1% of Americans now own well over 40% of
their nation's wealth. It is a skewed distribution that sets the US apart
from other modern industrialised nations. In Britain, widely viewed in
America as the embodiment of social stratification, the richest 1% owns
a mere 18% of the wealth.
-
- These disparities are, of course, not solely the work
of the Bush administration. The economic division of the country has been
under way for 20 years. After a long period of levelling incomes and wealth
after the second world war, inequality began to rise exponentially from
1980, driven principally by the boom in stock prices and the decline in
unions.
-
- Differentials continued to stretch, albeit more slowly,
under the Clinton administration, despite its efforts to institute a more
progressive tax policy. What sets the Bush era apart is the extent to which
policy has reinforced the divide rather than sought to mitigate it.
-
- Nearly half the benefits of Mr Bush's $1.35 trillion
tax cut in 2001 went to the richest 1%, while 60% of this year's cuts will
go to taxpayers with incomes of more than $100,000, according to the tax
policy centre run by the Urban Institute and the Brookings Institution
in Washington.
-
- Mr Bush also fought hard to repeal an inheritance tax
that affected only the wealthiest 2%, as well as cutting capital gains
tax and trying to abolish the tax on dividends.
-
- The Bush cabinet also stands out for its big money background.
Every member is a millionaire and, the Centre for Public Integrity says,
its total net worth is more than 10 times that of the Clinton cabinet.
-
- President Bush may not be the cause of America's unequal
society, but the members of his administration arguably personify a new
plutocracy.
-
- In the view of Kevin Phillips, an economic historian
and the author of a history of America's rich, Wealth and Democracy, you
have to go back more than 100 years to find an era when big money and government
were in such a tight embrace.
-
- "It's the second plutocracy after the gilded age,"
Mr Phillips said. "Laissez-faire is a pretence. Government power and
preferment have been used by the rich, not shunned. As wealth concentration
grows, especially near the crest of a drawn-out boom, so has upper-bracket
control of politics and its ability to shape its own preferment."
-
- Yet it would be hard to imagine a country less ripe for
social upheaval.
-
- Mr Bush may be politically vulnerable in the approach
to elections a year from now, but he remains favourite to win, and his
opponents in the Democratic party try to avoid the language of class warfare
at all costs. The "liberal" label can still spell death at the
polls.
-
- For outsiders, the absence of class-based politics is
the enduring mystery of American society. Among US analysts it is a matter
of ideological disagreement.
-
- David Brooks, a commentator at the conservative American
Enterprise Institute, believes the divide is cultural rather than economic.
It is the divide between the urban, cosmopolitan and liberal culture of
the coasts where there are "sun-dried tomato concoctions" on
restaurant menus - what he calls Blue America - and the conservative, church-going,
gun-owning, patriotic and mainly white culture of Red America.
-
- Red America eats meatloaf and votes for George Bush because
it identifies with his cultural values. Its people are not envious of the
top 1% of the population, Mr Brooks argues, because in Red America they
never meet them. Instead, they consider themselves lucky to live in their
own modest communities where prices are so low they see little they cannot
afford.
-
- "I didn't find many who assessed their own place
in society according to their income," he reported. "They don't
compare themselves with faraway millionaires who appear on their TV screens.
They compare themselves with their neighbours."
-
- Divide
-
- Paul Krugman, a Princeton economist and Mr Brooks' liberal
counterpart on the comment pages of the New York Times, argues that this
cultural divide is more manipulated than natural, and serves to mask the
society's ingrained inequity.
-
- "There has been a tremendously successful campaign
to shift the focus from economic elitism to cultural elitism," Mr
Krugman said. "Because the president uses short words and talks tough,
he is seen as an ordinary guy."
-
- Certainly, most Americans appear to take Mr Bush at face
value - as a plainspoken, homespun Texan, rather than the scion of a wealthy
East Coast family. It is hard to imagine his real social background passing
so unremarked in a British election campaign.
-
- His party has also toyed with the cultural imagery of
class, in one instance arranging for party loyalists to wear street clothes
and workmen's hard hats at a rally for the Bush tax cuts.
-
- The memo sent out to would-be demonstrators stressed
that "If people want to participate - AND WE DO NEED BODIES - they
must be DRESSED DOWN, appear to be REAL WORKER types etc."
-
- In the end, the televised rally involved the president's
supporters dressed as the working poor, cheering for more money to go to
the rich. It is hard to think of a more fitting tableau for Bush's America.
-
- Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited
2003
-
- http://www.guardian.co.uk/usa/story/0,12271,1077949,00.html
|
