- Presidential elections in America are long, with formal
campaigns lasting about a year and positioning leading to the campaigns
lasting nearly three years. A President's four-year term of office leaves
just enough time to dish out contracts and jobs.
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- There is nothing out of the ordinary in America about
the length of presidential campaigns. Elections for other offices consume
time pretty much in proportion to their power and importance. Senators,
for example, spend about two-thirds of their six-year term just raising
money for the next election.
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- American elections consume not just time but money, a
great deal of money. Bush is expected to have a quarter-billion dollars
in donations ready to fight for re-election. The nation's air waves will
be jammed for months with mind-numbing images easily confused with personal-hygiene
or toothpaste commercials.
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- In America's early years, only a few men of considerable
substance could vote. Any concept of wider democracy disturbed America's
founding fathers as risking their wealth to the votes and whims of men
without any. With the gradual, unavoidable extension of the American franchise
over two hundred years of wars and social movements, a political system
gradually emerged preserving the founders' concerns. Americans in theory
can vote for anyone, but the candidates they see and hear and whose names
appear on all the ballots in so vast a land will only be people effectively
pre-selected by those of great substance. It is an inherently conservative
system.
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- I don't want to put too much weight on the result of
the Iowa caucus, it is hardly a future-shaping event, but the winner, John
Kerry, brings pretty modest potential for change in America.
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- Kerry is an uninspiring figure, a man who has never stood
out on matters of life and death or great injustice. He declared his candidacy
in front of an aircraft carrier. Yes, he can shout his lines with the best
of them when seeking the power and privilege of high office, but Kerry's
voice is not one known for defending great principles. He opposed the war
in Vietnam toward the latter part of that holocaust against Asians, but
by that time being anti-war had become almost stylish, and Kerry's opposition
came only after a ferociously-ambitious effort at a successful career in
the war, a career that included shooting a man running away as well as
a man under his command killing a child.
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- The War on Terror, while remaining an undefined slogan,
is supported by Americans. Despite the odds of death by terror being not
much greater than death by lightning, an attack by nineteen men, all of
whom died in the effort, has caused America to kill thousands of innocent
civilians abroad, destroy the economy of Iraq, keep thousands of shackled
prisoners in offshore kennels, deport people against whom it has no evidence
so they can be tortured in other lands, and to pass fearful new laws.
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- Sentimental liberals continue to write about a glorious
national past blotted out by Bush, ignoring America's tradition of near-rabid
responses to real or imagined danger. This tradition began before the Revolution
with periodic waves of fear and violence in the South over imagined slave
revolts, and it continued with crazed slaughters of aboriginal people,
the police-state Alien and Sedition Acts under President Adams, Jefferson's
police-state enforcement of a boycott on British trade, beatings and killings
of blacks in the North thought responsible for conscription during the
Civil War, Lincoln's police-state suspension of basic rights in what was
a totally-avoidable war, periodic mass slaughters of blacks during the
twentieth century, the internment of Japanese Americans in concentration
camps during World War II, the wanton incineration of Japanese cities,
the McCarthy-era lunacy, a holocaust in Vietnam second in size only to
the Nazi's grim work, and countless ugly little colonial wars and overthrows
of elected governments.
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- It is notable that much of this kind of liberal writing
ignores the international dimension of what Bush has done, the truly new
and highly dangerous part of his handiwork. The authors focus on nasty
domestic laws and bringing the troops home. Most liberals, like most conservatives
in America, have a remarkable indifference about what happens to the world,
so long as it doesn't affect their enjoyment of life. It is a disturbing
orientation for people who, secretly or overtly, regard themselves as divinely-anointed
planetary overseers. So many times during the Vietnam War, I was astounded
that people went right on happily sucking beer and dancing while American
pilots napalmed villages in Asia. It was only when American coffins started
arriving by the hundreds that much popular music turned harsh and full
of protest and many proms lost their cozy glow.
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- There will be no return to what, before Bush, passed
as normal in America until the nation has shaken its latest violent seizure.
Even then, actions have been taken that will continue to sour the future.
Does anyone believe that all the new oppressive legislation in the United
States will be rescinded? that the bloated, dangerous increases in military
spending will be undone? that America's damage to international institutions
will be corrected? that America's contempt for its more thoughtful allies
will disappear? that the immense welling-up of prejudice against Arabic
people will simply disappear?
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- The truth is that even if a moderately liberal person
were elected President, he or she would face exactly what the Clintons
faced for eight years, a hideous and relentless assault with opportunity
for few meaningful accomplishments. The American Congress is so conservative,
and has demonstrated itself so lacking in courage or imagination or largeness
of view, that only the most modest changes can be expected under any president.
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- Failing new developments, the one big issue promises
to be whether the costly, pointless invasion of Iraq was a legitimate part
of the War on Terror. I believe the answer will hinge on how many Americans
continue to die rather than any rational discussion. The most troubling
aspect of this is the way many Bush opponents seem only to care about getting
American troops out of there. Where's the sense of responsibility for the
mess America created? Iraq will take many years to return to any kind of
meaningful society.
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- Well, by all means, it would be nice to see Bush back
with the rattlesnakes in Texas and once again to have a President capable
of addressing civilly the rest of the world - nice things but not a lot
to get excited about. No likely Democratic candidate is going to produce
a greatly more rational and decent United States. One or two Democrats,
Lieberman or Clark, almost certainly would be as narrow and harsh as Bush,
offering nothing beyond a day's satisfaction in seeing Bush sent packing.
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