WE WON'T WASTE YOUR TIME with a long screed on the reasons for our endorsement. If you're reading these lines, you either landed here by accident or you are a sophisticated observer of our political realities. In the latter case you would expect that a site populated by left-leaning activists would only consider Kerry or Nader as a possible ticket, but never Bush. And in that you'd be perfectly correct.
But we endorse Kerry with enormous reservations. His campaign is one of the most ineptly run efforts in recent memory. Vacillation, equivocations, tardy responses and generally less than smart handling--not to mention very transparent opportunism and pandering to the right on many issues (about which more below)--mark this campaign as one characterized by missed opportunities and self-inflicted injuries.
It's almost shocking that with a target as large as a stranded whale, and with Bush's obvious failures in plain view, in late October, with hardly two weeks to the election, Kerry is still not able to break out ahead of Bush but remains embarrassingly mired in sagging polls and controversy surrounding his clumsy and unnecessary remarks about Dick Cheney's daughter. (It's painful to watch loyal Democratic partisans as they try to put a brave face on what was, by any fair assessment, a serious faux pas on Kerry's part.)
The really frustrating thing about Kerry is that--rhetoric aside--he obviously continues to march under the bankrupt script concocted by the top Democratic party tiers of playing to the center and right in the hopes of stealing the wind from the Republican agenda--the infamous "GOP lite" formula--while shamelessly betraying their own base on the many urgent and basic issues confronting the masses.
Granted that it isn't easy or politically wise to speak clearly and honestly to a population so profoundly crippled by rightwing mythologies and backward notions, including the widespread religiosity and self-righteousness that still afflict the American polity. In that sense, a man like Bush, riding on the most undeveloped, traditionalist sectors of the population, and one capitalizing on the numerous confusions and fabrications that continue to appear unchallenged in the mainstream media, can sail ahead without having to strain his brain unduly to strike the "right chord." Leaving aside the inevitable priming, Bush has the luxury of being able to be himself, as his obvious deficits have already been largely discounted by the electorate.
Not so with Kerry, who, emerging from a bruising primary season, could at any time easily hurt himself by speaking out of turn. What's more, as things stand in our society, a candidate that needs nuanced explanations for his positions is a lame duck in a political culture built on soundbites and knownothingism. In sum, while Bush has been able to coast, Kerry has faced a topical minefield. All of this we acknowledge as true and weigh in Kerry's favor as an attenuating circumstance.
Heading toward self-destruction
But, even in a close election where some expediency may be in order, attention must be paid to core principles, principles that we have seen much too often breached or applied only haltingly and with stunning miscalculation. Kerry, if he had been strong and clear from the very beginning about his allegiance to a progressive agenda, ideally following his gut feelings about social justice, peace, and an environmentally sane planet, would be riding a comfortable, solid lead by now.
As in almost any country with enormous disparities in income, the majority in the US is objectively on the left, for the majority of the American people continues to experience in their daily lives a huge number of problems, threats, and frustrations chiefly issuing from a governance that, while claiming to be democratic, is, at bottom, oligarchic and thoroughly anti-democratic. How else do we explain the fact that the people need special lobbies to defend their agenda? What are Congress and the President for?
Kerry's gyrations are hard to explain. Tactically, he probably made the biggest mistake in this election by allowing his persona to be defined by his foe. In this, there is corroboration coming from an unexpected quarter, an ad executive who sees the whole thing in terms of a "branding failure." In a political culture in which spin, focus groups, marketing techniques, dirty tricks, and public relations are almost everything and substance and principle little or nothing, it scarcely suprises us that the problem should be framed as one of misguided "advertising." So, consider for a moment Abe Novick's impassioned plea against the "political hacks" in charge of shaping today's campaigns, and Kerry's in particular. Even allowing for the fact that it apparently comes from a true believer in the alchemy of Madison Avenue, it's worth a read:
"Imagine this: It's Wednesday, November 3rd and John Kerry just lost the election. Since he ain't going to Disneyworld, what should he be thinking? What went wrong?
One big word jumps to mind: branding. Brands stand for something and Kerry never gave a clear, consistent message. He was, from the outset, the anti-brand. He was not Bush. The chant from Democrats even supported this argument by declaring, "Anyone but Bush!" he was never the challenger brand, offering up something better.
Imagine if Pepsi's tagline was "Anything but Coke"? Or BMW claimed, "We're not Mercedes." It doesn't happen that way for good reason. Rather, when you think of BMW, you think performance. With Pepsi you think youth. Clear. Simple.
When you think Bush, you think "tough on terror." And terror was the issue in this election. Had Kerry realized it early on and made the case that he can fight it smarter, better, and safer than Bush by hammering away for a good solid year, it would have been a different race and a different outcome.
I get annoyed when I hear how politicians can't be branded. I'm told they're not Pepsi or BMW and that branding can't work the same way for a person as it would for some silly consumer product. Bunk![...] The problem with Kerry was he was never properly launched. He was never introduced in a way that voters would say. "Oh yeah, Kerry. He's [fill in the blank]." instead, he let his opposition define him.
Unless and until the parties, politicians and, in particular, the Democrats understand the power of branding, they will lose elections. Until they depart from what are used-car ads, as opposed to the great work agencies consistently do for the likes of car brands--Saturn, Volkswagen and BMW--they will be lost in the woods unable to see the forest." *
Novick is right, of course, but I'm afraid the woes of the Democratic Party and the Kerry candidacy run far deeper than using a wrong-headed advertising approach. At the end of the day, the flaw is strategic and, perhaps more serious, ethical. For while it may be true that elections in hotly contested races are won by catering to the marginal voter--the infamous "undecided"--there is no justification to stray so far from the base as to start denying the very principles that fuel it. This, as mentioned earlier, has been a long-embraced tactic of the Democratic Leadership Council. Democratic apparatchiks like Joe Lieberman, Al Gore, and even the hallowed Clintons, who, for all the hatred and fury they caught from the Right would hardly qualify in the international political arena as anything more than a pair of moderate centrists, have long played and continue to play opportunistic politics. These people are so deeply ensconced in the pockets of the corporate status quo that even when the American people back an initiative 3 to 1, they falter. Such was the case with the short-lived proposal to secure universal health care under the stewardship of Hillary Clinton. There are many other examples.
So this lack of "product differentiation" is now coming home to roost to actually hurt the Dems and possibly lose them an epochal election. Who could blame the public for this? Kerry's position on the war is for all intents and purposes congruent with Bush's--we gotta win, stay the course, bla, bla, and all the rest we have heard before. Heck, it's Bush's policy but better administrated. Is an immoral policy more virtuous if better administrated? Is an unjustified war suddenly justifiable because of a switch in management? Kerry, of all people, should know better.
The flight from principles by the Democratic Party--never too heavily encumbered by such things--was witnessed throughout that long and shameful season preparatory to the Iraq war during which the Dems literally folded as an effective opposition. Compounding this cowardice, the Party went on to stage a jingoistic coronation in Boston (what else are we to call this tightly-scripted extravaganzas?) during which Kerry, once more, opportunistically tilted against his honorable record as a Vietnam War critic, thereby helping to whitewash the criminality of that intervention. Only Al Sharpton had the intelligence and true leadership DNA to speak off script. He was a breath of fresh air.
Of course, the spin doctors had figured that Bush was outstripping Kerry on the "patriotic" index, the "tough hombre" talk, and that he needed a strong dose of flagwaving to prove his having some gonads to confront the "terrorist threat." But again, need we go so far? Has anyone paid close attention to the Kerry ticket's utterances on Israel, Iran, North Korea, Cuba, and Venezuela? Simply appalling, especially for a duo that promises more maturity in the use of American power. But, friends, patriotic or idiotic, will we ever see the day when liberals stand up firm against the baiting of the Right? (Don't hold your breath.)
Incidentally, those who grow apoplectic at the mention of Ralph Nader's name should direct their fury elsewhere. Scapegoating Ralph or any other small-party candidate is an exercise in futility, besides being eminently unfair. The Democratic Party has been selling out for many decades, in broad daylight. For generations it has happily played the "good-cop face" of a single party representing only one class interest. Liberals, who apparently never learn from history, are suddenly appalled at the horrors inherent in rightwing rule. Where were they as the right kept on accumulating more and more cultural and political power?
Trouble on all sides--and perhaps catharsis at last
Whatever the outcome on Nov. 2, the Democratic Party, as we know it, is in big trouble. If it loses, there is a high probability that the fissure between the opportunist right-wing leaning top tier and the left-leaning base will--like tectonic plates under enormous tension--snap and cause a huge convulsion likely to split the party into two irreconcilable factions.
If it wins, trouble will not manifest itself so rapidly, due to the "honeymoon effect," and the celebratory afterglow issuing from the Republican defeat, but the contradiction will surely re-emerge in time. The reason for this is actually quite simple: no party wedded lock, stock and barrel to the current brand of American capitalism and the obsolete myths underwriting it (see our article, whitewashing the face of capitalism) can hope to escape for long the mounting social turmoil caused by the sheer intractability of the unfolding global crisis. They can buy some time with stopgap measures, but they can never really snuff out the underlying dynamic. For that, we'd need an entirely new paradigm, and plenty of real leadership, something that--exception being made for a pitifully small band of honorable men such as Dennis Kucinich--we clearly won't find in the present Democratic Party.
Consider job loss, about which there is much equivocation.
Over the middle and long-run, the shrinking of the job base is likely to continue unabated here and abroad since it is inexorably embedded in the dynamic of replacing human labor with machines. (See our companion article on this topic.) Upticks may register here and there--economic activity is inherently uneven--but when we look at the whole field, over a period of years, it's obvious that, unless we stop technological progress altogether, fewer and fewer workers will be needed in any sector of the economy. This will hold true in both the developed and underdeveloped world.
Machine labor should not be feared because higher productivity in and of itself promises liberation from toil. The problem is that under the current set of property rules, the lion's share of the additional income goes to the owning and managerial classes, while the vast majority are forced to make do with sharply reduced incomes or no incomes at all. Thus, all the talk about "outsourcing," with its controversial and faintly chauvinist overtones, is a mere distraction on the road to the real crisis, which is structural. No amount of retraining or education will cure it.
The election may have been lost more than 20 years ago
The wits said that Napoleon lost Waterloo in the fields of Eton. We say the Democrats, to explain a defeat in November, will have to take a hard look at the past 20 years. For it is at least that long that is required to start telling the truth to the American people, educating them about the real causes for the intractability of the problems they face, the ostensible madness and confusion they see around the world, and to start forming a broad movement capable of sustaining and implementing a new vision. Until that essential work is done, the Democrats or any party purporting to offer real solutions--a new economy capable of meeting people's needs here and abroad, and the determination to stop the pillage of our planet and fellow creatures--will be either a witting fraud or a prisoner of the narrow status quo enforced by the Right. It isn't too hard to see how these limits have crippled the Democratic Party's ability to fire up the masses.
The straitjacket can be broken, all right, but it takes dedicated, courageous work. In 2004 the Democrats are asking for our vote without having done any of this essential work. Their rhetoric and formulas are shopworn; their "solutions" woefully inadequate to deal with the deepening crisis, their top personnel corrupt beyond repair. Their accidental triumph, should it happen, may give the world a mild, short-lived respite from the deepening chaos and plunder induced by the Bush administration.
Effective politics, however, demands an adjustment to real world conditions, with all its imperfections. In that sense, no doubt, there are areas such as the Supreme Court, the treatment of the environment, the judiciary, the injection of religiosity at the highest levels of governance, and the triumph of a new politics of popular imbecility, of deliberate "dumbing-down", where the dictinction between the parties may actually amount to something. Hence our reluctant endorsement. But for a real and lasting solution, our citzenry must leave behind the Pied Piper of American politics, and look way past the Democratic Party in its current incarnation.
D.P. Greanville
For the editorial board
* Quoted from letter to Advertising Age, October 2004.
