Finally some time to respond to your recent letter, where you asked me to explain the "crazy American political situation" and why "the U.S. is behaving so recklessly" with regard to Iran. Your terms are right on the mark.
First off, it's important to know that "the U.S." you refer to is mainly the Bush Administration. In poll after recent poll, Americans have indicated they regard his presidency as the worst ever in U.S. history. More than three-quarters of the citizenry, for example, now believe Bush's war in Iraq was a terrible mistake that has taken this country into a catastrophic quagmire, and nearly two-thirds want our troops to start withdrawing as soon as practicable.
In other words, though it took a few years to learn how to read (and ignore) the Bush-enabling corporate mass-media, the American citizenry overwhelming now "gets it." They understand that their reigning government is wildly off-track in terms of good governance and adherence to the Constitution, and, in important ways, is endangering U.S. national security in reckless misadventuring abroad. Americans also are mindful of the several trillion dollars that are being poured down the Iraq Occupation and "war on terror" ratholes, all to the detriment of our own infrastructure and social-program needs at home.
But, despite the tanking economy that is squeezing the middle class badly, and red-hot anger at the CheneyBush Administration for failing to deal with the issues most Americans care about (affordable health care, educational reform, good jobs, the Iraq disaster, college loans, sky-rocketing energy costs, etc.), the citizens tend to do little more than sign online petitions and occasionally send a donation to their preferred candidates.
The operating belief is that every four years, an election will resolve the situation so no need to get politically involved in a deep and consistent way. In addition, in this dismal economy a growing number of Americans are just squeezing by financially, if that, and feel they don't really have the time or energy to become active dissenters. Obama or Clinton, or maybe even John McCain, will take care of the situation in a few months anyway, many figure, so no need to do much.
All too often, these excuses demonstrate lazy thinking, of course, aided by the mass-media's concentrating on the electoral "horse race" and on distracting, trivial matters. But even if those citizen-expectations about the magic-bullet of elections were on the mark, there still would be problems. First, the voting and vote-tabulating systems are grossly deficient, provably corrupt and corruptable. Also, the three presidential hopefuls (all of whom are beholden, to a greater or lesser degree, to the usual elite political and corporate force$) leave much to be desired in terms of making significant changes, especially when it comes to American foreign/military policy.
McCAIN-THE-CHAMELEON
John McCain, for example, is basically a Bush clone when it comes to foreign policy, with a scary lust for war. He's content for U.S. troops to stay in Iraq for 100 years or more, and he's indicated his willingness, indeed eagerness, to bomb Iran. For McCain, as it is for Bush, the world is either simple black or simple white, no shades of complexity on the horizon. Act tough, act rough, the rest of the world will get out of our way, and American hegemony will prevail across the globe.
McCain clearly is the most extreme of the three, with little operative understanding of economics and, surprisingly, foreign-policy matters. Whether it's his advanced age, or simple stubborn obtuseness, he comes across as a locked-in-the-past ideologue. Does he really believe what he's saying or are his positions what he feels he's required to assert in order to strengthen the GOP base and lure the old "Reagan Democrats" to his side for the general election?
One telling anecdote in this regard before moving on to the Democrats: McCain has been buddy-buddies with Jon Stewart for nearly a decade, and in his "maverick Republican" phase was invited often to appear on Stewart's "The Daily Show"; there the two of them would banter and yuck it up. But when McCain appeared on the show in 2006, as he was gearing up to run again for president, Stewart, clearly disappointed in his hero, asked McCain why he was sucking up to the right wing fundamentalists by going to kiss the rings, so to speak, of the very ultraconservative leaders he once had exoriated as "agents of intolerance" who shouldn't be "pandered" to by politicians. McCain danced around the question, trying not to answer. But his old friend Stewart was relentless and finally McCain, apparently forgetting that he was on national television, and in the presence of his joking buddy Stewart and an adoring audience, smiled ruefully and admitted, yes, he was indeed kowtowing to "the crazy base," doing what he had to do to win the presidency. (See the full transcript of the exchange here, ( click here ) and analysis here.) ( www.washingtonmonthly.com/archives/individual/2006_04/008560.php )
The astute Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo has been following McCain for many years. Here's his explanation for McCain's current shameful behavior, ( http://talkingpointsmemo.com/archives/191465.php ) including taking the lower-than-Clinton attack road against Obama:
>> "The truth is that [McCain] doesn't actually have any real convictions -- or to put it more precisely, no real consistent convictions. That's evidenced in part by the kind of campaign the guy's running now. And at least a few of his press admirers are starting to sense that. But where you really see it most clearly is in the policy agenda he embraces.
>> "Genuine political and ideological transformations are pretty rare in contemporary American politics. Two in a row in less than a decade is close to unprecedented. McCain went from conservative Republican, to embracing many core Democratic policy positions and actively discussing a possible party switch, to cycling back and re-embracing the same policies."
In short, the McCain that Stewart and many others admired for his "maverick" willingness to confront the Bush Administration on campaign-finance reform, torture as state policy, racial intolerance inside the GOP, etc., is no more. Now it's the old guy who knows he has one arrow left in his quiver and is going to stand with the fundies and extreme conservatives on all the major issues because he believes that's his only chance to wind up in the White House. To quote Stewart again: "Has John McCain's Straight Talk Express been re-routed through Bullshittown?" The answer is, sad to say, yes.
Bernard Weiner, Ph.D. in government & international relations, has taught at universities in California and Washington, worked for two decades as a writer-editor at the San Francisco Chronicle, and currently serves as co-editor of The Crisis Papers (www.crisispapers.org).
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