Posts Tagged → U.S. election

Is Democratic Party festering in a rut?

AS I WAITED yesterday for the second Democratic presidential debate, I tossed out a question to Facebook. Could Joe Biden “get up before the referee counts to 10”? Some friends liked it, but none offered a response.

I had thought that the former vice president, so far the clear front-runner in the polls, would get a knockout punch from Bernie Sanders. The “democratic socialist” from Vermont is running second to him in the polls. I thought – and hope – that the Democratic Party has started loosening its embrace of Wall Street and social conservatives, coddled by Bill and Hillary Clinton and the now dormant Democratic Leadership Council. The Barack Obama presidency, despite Obama’s progressive rhetoric, was basically and extension of that era.

Biden did get a crushing blow during the debate. He was pummeled over his professed pride in working with racist lawmakers, opposition to school busing, insensitivity to the plight of immigrants, dillydallying on the abortion issue, vote for the Iraq war, and other right-wing positions. And CNN declared him a “direct loser” of the contest.

But it was mostly the foxy Kamala Harris, not Sanders, who gave him most of the thrashing. And most of the post-debate analysts in the news media anointed Harris winner of the encounters.

Sanders’ main problem with many Democrats has been his no-holds-barred blitzkrieg against the established, if corrupt, political and economic order and his call for a revolution to trash it. Many centrist and right-of-center Democrats have been leery about it. His push for Medicare of all, a free college education and elimination of all student debts, ending all foreign wars, and so forth, also rattle many Democrats for whom the established order is akin to religion.

Mainstream media, most of them owned by mega corporations, have been rankled by Sanders’ anti-corporate, anti-capitalist programs and rhetoric. Salon dismissed his political surge as “more about anti-Clinton sentiment than actual Bernie fever.”

On foreign policy, the mainstream media have traditionally followed the American flag, largely because of their thin grasp of foreign affairs. The late Andy Kohut of the Pew Research Center told me in 2008 that “more than 60 percent of our [Middle East] correspondents have no grounding in the dynamics of societies across the Mediterranean.”

Much of the media and many Democrats appear to be leaning toward Harris and Elizabeth Warren, who appeared in last night’s debate. These two high-energy, combative senators are progressive enough to tear the last Democratic vice president into pieces and revile the exploitative neoliberal economic establishment, while not threatening to dismantle that establishment. Harris is also popular with pro-Israeli Democrats, a substantial chunk of the party, because of her Jewish husband and hobnobbing with Benjamin Netanyahu and other right-wing Israeli politicians.

The primaries are a barometer of the Democratic Party’s center of gravity. I will be watching them to see how much of the party has broken loose of its corporate, right-wing tether. Are enough of them ready to jump into Sanders’ revolutionary bandwagon? Would they settle, instead, for a more conventional but still progressive candidate like Harris or Warren? Or do too many of them remain too invested in the Clintons-Wall Street economic order to abandon Biden, who seems to be running for a third term for Obama?

Last night’s was just the first of six primary debates that the Democratic National Committee plans for the party’s presidential candidates, the sixth is scheduled for December. We probably won’t know until the new year whether the bulk of party has moved past the Clinton-Obama era or is still staggering in a rut.

-Mustafa Malik, an international affairs commentator in Washington, hosts this blog.

Trump is right, no blank check

COULD DONAL TRUMP, of all people, help mend American democracy?

I bet you’ve read the story about the third presidential debate in some major newspaper yesterday. Chris Wallace, the moderator, asks the Republican presidential nominee if he would commit himself to accepting the results of the November 8th vote, whatever that might be.

“I will look at it at the time,” Trump replied. “What I have seen is so bad. First of all, the media is so dishonest and corrupt and has … poisoned the minds of voters.” He went on to suggest that Hillary Clinton’s corporate patrons and her campaign were rigging the election against him.

Trump’s comment has sent shudders through the American media and political establishments.

“Donald Trump Won’t Say If He’ll Accept the Result of Election,” exclaimed the Page One banner on the New York Times lead story. The reporters, Patrick Healy and Jonathan Martin, put us on notice that Trump’s “remarkable statement” had “cast doubt on American democracy,” besides “horrifying” Clinton, his Democratic rival and partner in the debate.

“At third debate, Trump won’t commit to accepting election results,” bewailed the Washington Post headline.

The headline on a Boston Globe column warned: “Donald Trump undermines the legitimacy of our democracy.”

Call me dumb, but I don’t get it. I’m baffled by the widespread hysteria sparked by Trump’s comment. I thought that the GOP nominee was saying simply that this electoral process has been corrupted so pervasively that its outcome could become suspect and may need to be reviewed. What’s wrong about that?

In fact, the American electoral process, especially since the Supreme Court’s Citizens v. United decision, has put up American democracy on an auction bloc for special interests to bid on. Jimmy Carter, Noam Chomsky and other American statesmen and intellectuals have been telling us that we no longer have democracy in this country. What we have is a plutocracy. And I agree with them. So do most Americans.

Just glance through the posts on your Facebook News Feed, or ask the lady next to you at a Starbucks counter, about what’s going on in the two presidential campaigns. You would immediately know, if you already haven’t, what “the world’s greatest democracy” has come to: money flooding the election campaigns; candidates selling public trust for personal gains; public officials appear to be lying under oath to hide a candidate’s illegal activity; government agencies, especially arms of the Justice Department, potentially violating the law to get someone elected, or needlessly immunizing someone against possible perjury; and so on. Yet the most surprising thing about it all, to me at least, is that nobody seems to care – or dare – to stand up and say, “Enough is enough! Let’s fix the mess.”

Amnesia and resignation appear to have paralyzed us against the long-overdue clean-up of our political system, which probably is envied by crooked politicians in some of the autocratic and pseudo-democratic countries. Frankly, I’d have liked to see Al Gore take a stand against the Republican shenanigans that cost him the presidency in 2000. Maybe Richard Nixon should have asked for a thorough review of 1960 voting in Chicago. As we know, “the Daley machine,” created by then Chicago Mayor Richard J. Daley, rigged the presidential election in his city that year in favor of  John F. Kennedy.

Our lethargy in the face of the meltdown of our democracy reminds me of death sentences given to Pakistani Muslims who are accused of having lost their faith in Islam. Nobody challenges those draconian fatwas or rulings, even though many Pakistanis are disgusted with them. The reason: nobody wants to be accused of running afoul of what some moronic clerics have, because of their loopy reading of scripture, proclaimed as Islamic canons.

In America, religion has been disestablished by the Founding Fathers, wisely of course. But most Americans, as most people in the world, still need religion, or some other belief system. Anthropologists tell us that faith in a creed establishes order, security and goals in believers’ minds, without which their lives lose their meaning and purpose.

In our secular American society, capitalist democracy has virtually replaced Christianity and become a “public religion,” to borrow sociologist Robert Bellah’s phrase. You call the process into question, however unfair and venal it might be, and all hell breaks loose. Trump’s refusal to accept the election results three weeks before the voting will actually take place is “horrifying,” not just to Hillary Clinton, but, as we’ve noted, to most of the American media and intelligentsia. Can someone help me understand how you may begin to rescue our democratic institutions from the ubiquitous clutches of interest peddlers unless you challenge their knavery and misdeeds that are ailing those institutions and contorting their output.

Trump is the most reckless ignoramus that the Republican Party has nominated to be our president since George W. Bush. A Trump presidency would be, not only fraught with danger, but a disgrace for America as well. Luckily, opinion polls show that he’s going lose the election big time. And he should.

All the same, I find myself, strangely as it seems, defending his refusal to pre-approve the results of the election. Yes, many other losers in presidential races chose to forfeit beforehand their right to recheck voting results, should there be serious irregularities in the process. But what has that accomplished? It has served only to perpetuate the biennial and quadrennial charade, called the “democratic process,” and has practically disenfranchised us by mortgaging our unfettered constitutional right to choose our government and legislatures to special interests of all kinds

I’d hope that Trump’s challenge to our failing electoral system would inspire others to break the taboo against trying to clean it up.

– Mustafa Malik is an international affairs analyst in Washington. He hosts the blog: Muslim Journey (https://muslimjourney.com).