The world breathed a collective sigh of relief earlier this month
after November 6, 2012 when the American voters who dealt with the disgraceful
voter suppression campaigns in Republican States, the long line ups and the
charade of electoral incompetence which is the State of Florida re-elected
Barack Hussein Obama as President of the
United States for a second term.
The result wasn't that close despite the spin by the right.
Jack Kennedy won over Richard Nixon by only 200,000 votes in 1962 and in this
election the that 18th Century anachronism of the US Constitution, The Electoral College, did exactly what The Founders intended it to do, transforming a small but
significant popular mandate into a decisive electoral mandate, 332 Electoral
College votes for Obama to 206 for Romney. This left some Republicans such as
the loathsome Karl Rove and the merely ludicrous Donald Trump in spluttering
denial but these paragons of Constitutional Law had no such qualms in 2000 when
George W. Bush won over a half a million less of the popular vote than Al Gore
but received 271 electoral votes to Gore's 266 after the Supreme Court vetoed a
Florida recount. Indeed to but Obama’s
win into context, only four Presidents in the last century have won 50% of the votes
twice, Roosevelt, Eisenhower, Regan and Obama.
The Republican Party has paid the penalty for allowing flat
earth nutters to hijack the party and for failing to widen its electoral
appeal. Pushing socially conservative values harder, attacking abortion
provision and same-sex rights while shouting loudly that God is on your side is
deeply ugly, and, clearly, not just on this side of the Atlantic. This aspect
of the GOP excludes economically conservative but socially liberal politicians
from standing as their presidential candidate. It forces someone like New York
Mayor Michael Bloomberg to urge voters to back Obama. By co-opting the Tea
Party racists, religious fundamentalists and being anti-immigration the
Republicans narrowed their potential voters and simply ran out of white people.
This difference was very apparent at Obama’s victory rally
in Chicago where the audience looked like the modern diverse American
electorate. At Mitt Romney’s rally in Boston at the same time the contrast was
stark, we saw a narrow cross section of white preppy America. No doubt for the
idiot right Obama will be a hate figure guilty of the same grave crime as Bill Clinton,
winning re-election. Wake up Republican Dinosaurs, America has voted against
doing stupid.
Liberal reaction has been predictably gleeful. New Yorker
columnist Andy Borowitz (@BorowitzReport) tweeted: “BREAKING: Man Who Told Half
the Nation to F*** Themselves Somehow Loses Election” and “BREAKING: Only
minutes to go until Mitt Romney starts running for President again.”
All in all, Mitt Romney never gave the public a good enough
reason to vote for him as a person. He never effectively made the case for
Romney himself, instead allowing others to define him. The depressing aspect
was the relentlessly negative campaigning against Romney which avoided arguing
to the issues and instead denigrated the candidate. The truth is Romney was a
good and credible candidate, no more so when compared to the rest of the
Republican field. Mitt Romney's father was an impressive character who had an ability to
think outside the box and a dedication to Public Service. His son is an
intelligent, well qualified and able person. Bain Capital, despite the
propaganda, has generally been a long term valued added investor not a smash
and grab vulture capitalist organisation, Romney impressively turned around the
Salt Lake City 2002 Winter Olympics and he was a socially liberal Governor of
Massachusetts. However it is telling
that in this election he was not able to win over Massachusetts, his father’s
State of Michigan or Paul Ryan’s home State of Wisconsin. When the key swing
States of Virginia, Ohio and Iowa fell to Obama it was game over.
There are also the two elephants in the room, religion and
race. As an atheist I am not an admirer of the Mormon religion but for all its cockamamie
tenets it is only marginally more delusional than other Christian religions –
“there is only one God but he comes in three parts and one of them is his son
who was human and while we are at it lets steal the history of the Jewish
People and claim it as our Old Testament.” In any event the US Constitution
expressly forbids a religious test for public office. As Colin Powell commented
in 2008 when the right wing tried to claim Obama was secretly a Muslim “the
better question is why should a Muslim NOT be President of the United
States?”
There is no doubt also that a great deal of the visceral
opposition to this talented son of a white Anthropologist and a black Economist
rested on his race. The pouring in of hundreds of millions to buy the election
by the odious Koch Brothers and the constant nastiness and truth distortion by
Murdoch owned media was an attempt to hijack democracy which the voters saw
through and rejected. No doubt this abject failure will only encourage the
right wing Neanderthals to try harder; they have never relied on the evidence or being Creationist
So what does “Four More Years” get us, where do we go
forward to?
If the oft repeated slogan “Leader of the Free World” ever
had some meaning it has become a bad joke in recent times, America’s attempts
to be virile and project its power in invading Afghanistan and Iraq have
instead exposed starkly the limits of Imperial power and pushed the country
into debt financed by Communist China. Neither foray has achieved its objective
but has killed millions, destabilised the world and thrashed the very countries
the US claimed to be rescuing.
The US would do well to remember the lessons of the Cold
War, Russia lost not because of the quality of its nukes but because of the
quality of its economy.
After the banal and often irrelevant rhetoric of the
Presidential Election and the use of clichéd sporting allusions (we have your back)
to simplify the world for voters with comic strip minds the United States needs
to deal with serious problems of decline, largely to do with its own addictions
and greed.
I hope the coming year is the year America stops being
confrontational and divisive internally and externally, stops spending fortunes
it doesn't have on its military and imprisoning its own people and starts to
get its Mojo back – for that Barack Obama will have to find the courage which
has eluded him in his first term to tackle America’s systemic failings;
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- · STOP being in thrall to military force and the vested interests of the Military Industrial Complex with an unsupportable military budget (financed by borrowings) of £711 BILLION! To put that in context that is five times greater than its nearest rival (China) and almost as much as the rest of the world spends in total. The wars in Afghanistan and Iraq far from demonstrating American power have (like Vietnam before) demonstrated its severe limits and America’s weakness. American keeps 11 full Carrier Battle Groups afloat (Its nearest rival, Russia, has two but not of the same calibre) and American armed personnel are stationed in 143 countries of the world. There needs to be huge cutbacks in the unsustainable and largely wasted military budget. Take American forces out of Europe, Middle East and Japan – the world and America will, if anything, be safer.
- · Stop subsidising dictatorship - $1.8 Bn to Israel which destabilises the Middle East, $1.2 Bn to Pakistan which sponsors the Taliban, $ 0.8 Bn to Egypt to keep a reactionary armed force together which rips off its own people? Etc; If the US stopped these military subsidies it would force these countries and their self-serving elites to deal with reality.
- · Stop imprisoning its own people – Over 2 million Americans are incarcerated, largely Blacks and Hispanics’ imprisoned by white blue collars, in a privatised penal system where contracts guarantee inmates and prison occupancy to private companies. In Louisiana the per capita incarceration rate is seven times the rate in Russia, which is saying something. What a turnaround that the “Land of the Free” treats so many of its own people as enemies with higher crime and homicide rates than countries which don’t brutalise at great cost its own population.
- · End the phoney Wars on Terrorism and Drugs. There is of course a great synergy here as America’s policy in creating a corrupt and unstable Narco-State in Afghanistan has increased the heroin supply 8 fold. Stop fighting phoney wars and looking for conflict which has made the world unstable – try instead partnership, listening and soft power – want an example; see how China has increased its influence and trade while America borrows money from China to pay for its wars? Perhaps the war on drugs should be on consumption and consumers and not on production and producers?
- · Stop Farm subsidies. The US spends $20 Bn a year on farm subsidies and the EU 39 Bn euros. For people who believe in Free Trade these are huge distortions of the concept and destroy third world economies whilst ensuring US and EU consumers are overcharged for food their taxes have subsidised in the first place – a true double whammy. End development aid (most of which goes to corrupt elites and not to the poor) and farm subsidies. A victory for Free Trade and the deficit dealt with at a stroke.
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| The right to arm Bears |
- · Introduce proper gun control – America does not need “militias” of racist white rednecks to defend itself. Its own people need defending from the consequences of ballistics madness which have killed and maimed by a substantial factor far more Americans than “America’s Enemy’s.”
Barack Obama has his work cut out for the next four years
but hope is not enough, he needs to demonstrate his audacity.
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