Running Scared for the Presidency

If readers of The Tyee indulge me, I intend to write something of a journal during the American election year.

Let me put some of my cards on the table. I am an American-Canadian here since 1969, and equally alienated from my two societies. I grew up a progressive Democrat during the Joe McCarthy years in Wisconsin, and naturally gravitated to the NDP when I came up here.  I am no longer a card carrying member of the NDP, whose intellectual collapse alienated me, although the swing rightward of the Liberals leaves me without any party identification.

Rather than a post-modern ironist about politics, I am a disillusioned idealist, with a tiny pocket of me secretly hoping to be disabused of my disappointments. But I am a professional historian who believes that detachment is golden. As I age I find this state is not difficult to maintain, (alas).

Charisma and snake oil

This evening a bunch of old white folks in Iowa will finally start off the flurry of Democratic primaries dedicated to selecting the most likely candidate to beat George Bush II. Unlike Canadian election campaigns, which are mercifully short (ours will be folded into April and May this year), American ones go on forever--it has been a year thus far, with ten months to go.  So endurance counts for a lot when conducting a high stakes activity notorious for day to day volatility. So does that certain je ne sais pas quoi that ignites the eventual victor's fires.  Call it charisma.  Call it snake-oil peddling.  Whatever, as my students say.

Two predictions.  One: Good old Richard Gephardt, the capable but aging Missourian, favorite of the labour unions (membership at 8.6 percent of the private work force), who still opposes NAFTA for exporting American jobs, will finish fourth tomorrow and soon be gone from the race.

Two: Howard Dean, the front-runner, will begin a slide, recover somewhat in New Hampshire, the next primary, and then crash in the subsequent round of primaries in South Carolina and elsewhere.

Dean is lost on me: he seems like a chippy little flake who lacks that presidential gravitas.  What he ignited is far more interesting than he is--an internet political revolution that has engaged tens of thousands of youngish people in a manner previously untapped by the political process.  That is another topic, one to which I may return, although I don't understand the new dynamics very well.  However, this new medium created a flash in a pan rather than an unstoppable force. 

I am not quite sure why Bill Bradley and Al Gore hopped aboard to support Dean at so early a date--their reputations and their influence will decline dramatically in the Democratic Party due to their premature bandwagoning.  Or so I guess. Wily old Bill Clinton knew better, and he has kept his powder dry.

Dean's competition

Who will this early round leave after several fringe candidates quickly disappear, followed by Dean? Three white men of considerable talent, untested nationally:

Senator John Kerry of Massachusetts, very presidential, very aloof, good foreign affairs and national security credentials;

Senator John Edwards of North Carolina, a teddy bear sure to be popular with women voters as he is conciliatory and kind of sweet on the surface, barely covering blind ambition (but then immodesty is necessary for all of these guys);

General Wesley Clark, very military, very smart, still relatively unknown to the public.

Warming up to the General idea

Any of these three could catch fire.  Or perhaps none will ignite and the Democrats will go into their July convention without a clear choice and for once the convention will amount to something other than an anointment.

My hunch is Wesley Clark.  He does not give the appearance of a professional, insider politician (although no one becomes a four-star general who cannot play bruising infighting politics--a quality that made the brilliant Clark unpopular with the other, rather stupid military high brass).  He can light up audiences, he has clear opinions, and I think that most Democrats are hoping that he could tear George Bush apart in a debate on national security and military matters, their area of maximum fear.

Fear is the point. The Democrats, like many liberal-minded and moderate Americans are running very scared about the George II regime.  Fear-mongering, a draconian home security policy, a failure to create jobs in the economy while rewarding the rich with unneeded tax cuts, a still brutal war based on lies and maintained by deceit, an imperial fuck you approach to all other nations  (excepting the obsequious Blairland), an in your face Evangelical religiosity, all delivered with smarmy arrogance, have enraged Democrats. Many secretly think that the right f-word to use about the Bush administration is fascism.

So the only real question for those Iowa Democratic primary voters, as for others to come, will be who can most likely beat George II.  Yes the economy is important, as is right to choice, appropriate Supreme Court justices and all the rest, but the gut-wrenching, bottom-line question is war and peace, expansionist empire or national equipoise, liberty or repression in the name of security.

Brink of despair

That anyone could believe in George II frightens Democrats. That as of this writing a considerable majority of Americans buy his line and appear ready to re-elect him drives them to the brink of despair. But they are girding their loins for a fight and they want the best warrior to lead them.  Hence Clark.

I may be entirely wrong about this.  Stay tuned.

And you had better believe that this matters to Canadians.

Historian Michael Fellman, author of several books on the Civil War including The Making of Robert E. Lee, is Director of the Graduate Liberal Studies Program at Simon Fraser University.