Bush: The Second Coming

The front page of London’s Daily Mirror asks “How can 59,054,087 people be so DUMB?” A fair question, perhaps, but one that could as easily be asked of many voters who supported John Kerry. The simple truth is that the majority of voters – indeed, the majority of Americans – are ill-informed and easily manipulated consumers of information. This was as evident in Carl Rove’s campaign to monger fear and distrust (with respect to terrorists in the corn fields of the Midwest, polygamous homosexuals invading from the Northeast, or the impending holocaust on pluripotent stem cells) as it was in any number of commercial efforts to sell us the unnecessary and the unhealthful products they so frequently peddle.

Were the electorate focused on issues in any honest way, could we have had as many undecided voters so late in the game? After three years of the Bush administration, three moderately informative debates, and endless analysis in the mainstream and alternative media why did both of the major parties feel compelled to resort to the marketing (and assassination) of superficial character traits? Because the battle is primarily one of numbers, however obtained, and only secondarily about policy.

It is astounding that the American public allowed Carl Rove to repackage a tenure marked by incompetence, deceit, arrogance, and corruption as one of strength, integrity, compassion, and morality. When we allow politicians to reinforce our own self-delusions we are complicit in this badly broken process. It is a burden that future generations will have to bear.

It is becoming increasingly apparent that the two-party system in this country is at the root of our problems, having given rise to expensive and prolonged marketing campaigns in which the blindly loyal target the mass market middle. Until and unless we can make participation by third party candidates a viable option this process will continue to degrade. The obstacles to improving third-party involvement, though, are substantial, ranging from winner-take-all elections and a failure to embrace automatic runoff voting to campaign finance laws and redistricting plans that favor incumbents of the two major parties.

More importantly, though, third party candidates are (rightly) perceived as fringe elements, either on the extreme left or the extreme right. What is needed is a Moderate Party – one that could draw a large core constituency from the existing ranks of the Republican and Democratic parties. Such a party, strategically launched and including prominent defectors from both of the major parties, could have an immediate and significant impact on the election process. With the major parties no longer able to make a run to the middle, the public would finally be able to decide among competing ideologies.

Perhaps when the stranglehold of the major parties is finally broken we can return to honest public debate about the issues.

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