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archived: 5 - 11 Dec, 2004 Back Next Updated: December 6, 2004 DEJA VU – NEVER AGAIN! “Post-9/11, American media was filled with peremptory denunciations of unpatriotic ‘conspiracy theorists,’ who not only are always with us, but are usually easy for media to discredit since it is an article of faith that there are no conspiracies in American life.” Gore Vidal, Dreaming War, 2002. “Bush will lose in a landslide, but if the election is conducted on those paperless machines, he can’t lose.” Gore Vidal, 2004. On election night in 2000, I entered the North Raleigh Hilton for the Democratic victory party. As I drove my rental car to the festivities, I heard the network broadcasters award the state of Florida to Albert Gore. This was early in the evening, circa 8.00 pm. I moved through the lobby and the Afro-American porters were smiling about the Florida call. Upstairs the mood was optimistic, and the smiles were broadening. Later that evening, I was standing with Steve Gheen in the forum of the Hilton as we watched in utter dismay while Dan Rather announced that the Florida call was being retracted (unprecedented in my memory). Gheen looked at me and said, “There is no way we can win without Florida.” Hoping that the result might be reversed, we had a long wait – until the 12th of December when the US Supreme Court ruled on the case. Listening to the arguments of his son, Antonin Scalia would write an opinion that would drive a stake into the heart of American democracy. His faithful sidekick, Clarence Thomas – whom he had encouraged to convert to Roman Catholicism - followed Scalia’s suit and helped him severe the head of the supine corpse. Why shouldn’t he? His wife had been on the payroll of the Bush Transition Team for weeks at that point. These events closed the chapter on American democracy and opened a new one in which we are all now part of a strategically dominant nuclear empire of global proportions. In those dark days four years ago, the age of the American nuclear empire was opening predicated on the dictum, “The oil must flow.” This year, on election night I was in Oxford watching the American networks. The exit polls came in confirming the most reliable polls of the previous weeks. Kerry would win the key battleground states (Ohio, Florida, Pennsylvania, New Mexico, Oregon, Nevada), and he would become the 44th president of the United States. The networks reported the smiles and frivolity at the Democratic Party festivities and the gloom descending over the Republicans. Later, it all changed again. Suddenly it was 2000, and the states that had exit-polled Democratic turned red instead of blue when the tallies were reported. This was a nightmarish deja vu. There were cheesy images of the Bush family watching the televised results. The next morning, there was immense pressure on Kerry to concede, and he duly complied with a tearful performance on the stage of Faneuil Hall. Bush’s victory speech resonated with the arrogance of imperialist power that had transformed a once proud democracy into a dictatorial theocracy in four years. Three weeks after the election, Rove and Bush were attending the official opening of the Clinton Library situated on a riverside near Little Rock. Karl Rove was heard bragging, “I change constitutions. I put churches in schools.” At the same event, his hand-puppet, GWB, was heard to mutter the following inanity, “A submarine could take this place out.” Both men were terribly bored, and they left early to dream about the opening of the George W. Bush Presidential Library sometime in 2012, someplace in Texas. Neither man has a clue about the history of America, nor its constitutional democracy. That is why they will recommence ripping the constitution to shreds immediately after their prayerful inauguration next month. While no more than twenty-something percent of Americans have noticed the dissolution of their democracy that fact has not escaped the notice of the wily Europeans. The Organisation for Security & Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) is producing a damning report. The OSCE states that the Help America Vote Act (HAVA) is merely an early step on a road that might eventually lead to bringing internationally acceptable standards of democracy to American voters. The active verb in the previous sentence is, “might”. The huge discrepancies between the exit polls and the election results have not escaped the notice of millions of Americans. At this moment, there is a plethora of private investigations unfolding against the backdrop of suspicions of electronic voting machines, vote fraud, rigged results and voter suppression. At the same time, the citizens of the Ukraine are preparing themselves for a new vote on the 26th of December, for their government has thrown out the results of their blatantly rigged presidential election. The OSCE issued a damning report immediately after the polls closed in Kiev, and the US had the audacity to issue statements from Colin Powell and George Bush condemning the corruption of the Ukrainian political system. The internet is alive with stories and reports of the Ohio recount and electronic voter fraud, but the mainstream US media have locked the story out of their coverage. This Wednesday, John Conyers and Mel Watt convene their official “Members Briefing” in the Rayburn office building to air complaints stemming from thousands of reports of vote rigging and election fraud now streaming into their offices on Capitol Hill. Apparently vote fraud in the Ukraine meets the threshold of coverage in America while similar charges from Ohio and Florida and New Mexico and Nevada do not. Amidst this dire set of circumstances, the Democratic Party is now in the throes of its quadrennial evolutionary metamorphosis. This weekend, the state chairs will meet in Orlando, Florida to survey the field for the next chair of the DNC. Howard Dean has been prominently mentioned as a leading candidate for the job. Kerry’s choice, Governor Tom Vilsack of Iowa has declined to run, which is a firm setback to Kerry’s base of power in the party. Other contenders are: Ron Kirk of Texas; Donnie Fowler of South Carolina; Simon Rosenberg the founder of the New Democratic Network; Wellington Webb the mayor of Denver, Leo J. Hendry, Jr. a major fundraiser; Jeanne Shaheen the governor of New Hampshire. Expect a shorter list after next weekend. In February, the Democratic National Committee will convene to elect the new Chair. This will probably be the last opportunity to transform the party between now and the next presidential election in 2008. In a recent comment, I proposed a new strategic paradigm for the Democratic Party. I believe that we should renew our policy of running to our strengths like FDR, HST, JFK, LBJ, HHH and JEH did so admirably. Let us remember that the New Democratic paradigm has not delivered even one election victory since its inception in the late eighties. While it claims the victories of Clinton, those are false claims. In 1992, Clinton was elected with the assistance of Ross Perot who severed twenty points off of George Bush-41’s base. Perot repeated the favor in 1996. The New Democrats do not even deserve the credit for Clinton winning the nomination. That prize goes to James Carville, not for positioning Clinton’s policies sagaciously in the jostling field of candidates, but for his crisis management of the Jennifer Flowers affair. By labeling Clinton the ‘Comeback Kid’ and with immense help and support from Hillary, Carville was able to tap into public sympathy for his candidate’s personality. Clinton was transformed from a New Democratic technocrat, into an everyman who deserved a second chance. He made the connection, and the rest is history. In the 2004 election, Democratic political consultants performed badly. Bob Shrum and his team led by Tad Devine allowed the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth (SBVT) to demolish the personal credibility of their candidate without so much as saying “boo” for the first six days of the onslaught. The Israelis won their war against the Arabs in the same amount of time, and the god of the Bible and the book of Genesis created the world in the same span of time. But Shrum, Devine and their ilk did nothing, nada, zip for the first six days of what would prove to be their terminal crisis. They allowed Kerry to dangle in the wind as the SBVT mutilated his swinging corpse for six horrible days without so much as uttering one peep of indignation. At that point, Kerry decided to put both of his feet into his mouth at the Grand Canyon where he introduced his version of doublespeak stating that he had voted for the eighty-seven billion dollars before he voted against it. From there, the Republican National Convention soundly labeled him a flip-flopper, and Zell Miller fired up the Dixiecrats with the most humiliating political speech ever leveled at any presidential nominee in American history. The Republican National Convention ended a week of bashing Kerry, and Bush soared upward in the polls. At that point in time, the Shrum strategy lay dead, shattered and tattered and dead as a doornail, while Kerry was in free fall in the polls. Bush surged to a commanding lead of thirteen points in some of the most widely publicized polls. At that crucial juncture, James Carville entered from stage left to set the Democratic Party on fire. On Saturday morning, Carville threatened to go on Meet the Press the following day to rubbish the Kerry campaign as totally incompetent. Carville’s gambit forced Kerry to have his long night of the soul in a ninety-minute telephone conference with Bill Clinton who had just suffered a major heart attack. Clinton and Carville brought the Kerry campaign back down to earth with a new strategy. Kerry would now attack Bush for some of his egregious foreign policies. From that point, Kerry began to climb back into the race, and in the debates, he brilliantly pummeled Bush into a bleeding pulp. Kerry regained a breath of momentum, and the gold standard of presidential pollsters, John Zogby announced that he would win the presidency. Then the exit polls fell into place, but the election results cancelled them out and aborted yet another embryonic era of American democracy. In the aftermath, Joe Trippi, who steered the Dean campaign to the head of the pack in 2003 published a sagacious piece in the Wall Street Journal. Trippi pointed out that the Democratic Party keeps repeating the same mistakes it has made over the past sixteen years always expecting to get a different result. Trippi observed, quite correctly, that this sort of self-damaging repetitious behavior is the textbook definition of insanity. While the Democratic Party has lost a series of elections, the American people have lost much more. They have lost their antiquated and outdated version of democracy. The termination of democracy in Imperial America is a political holocaust of global proportions, and those who have not yet done so must now wake up and smell the corpses. Never again!
Last Update: 03/23/2006 |
