Ah, the glory that awaits Obama!
SYNDICATED COLUMN: Give War a Chance
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Time for Democrats to Get Mean
“All of us feel it. There is a sickness in the American political system, a withering of the public faith in government that is so essential to our democracy. This has always been a country of rough political rhetoric. But the personal viciousness, the haste, the ideological shrillness are worse now than for many years.”
—Anthony Lewis, New York Times, 1-29-96
Anthony Lewis obviously lives in a different world from the rest of us. Where I live, the main problem with the two-party system is a general absence of personal viciousness. Forget posturing on trivial matters like the budget impasse. On issues that really affect Americans on a day-to-day basis, Democrats and Republicans are in complete agreement.
Both parties agree that at least 6 percent of American workers should be kept systematically unemployed in order to keep inflation down. The parties of Jackson and Lincoln both favor tax cuts for the rich, a less-progressive tax structure and unregulated free trade.
Neither the Democrats nor the Republicans favor restoring the college direct-grant system. Neither favors improving mass transit. Neither really accepts the existence of global warming, much less feels the need to do anything about it .
This evil spirit of bipartisanship poorly serves citizens who disagree with the Uniparty’s mad rush to an illusive center.
Citizens of European-style parliamentary democracies have dozens of distinct political party platforms to choose from, ranging from extreme left to extreme right. In France or Italy, for example, Socialists don’t do lunch with Christian Democrats. They don’t sleep together either, à la Matlin and Carville. Ideology is serious business there, and voters are better represented.
Accepting for the moment that our wretched nation is limited to two parties, we have the right to at least expect two distinct stances on most issues.
The wimp-owned and -operated Democrats are particularly responsible for the current one-party system. As demonstrated by Clinton’s pathetic groveling for common ground with the Republicans in his State of the Union address, Democrats parrot pro-business Republicans on virtually every issue. Perhaps most unforgivably in a country that worships macho posturists, they never fight back when the GOP slanders them. All of the most outrageous televised attack ads of recent decades have been Republican ones–Nixon comparing McGovern’s national health care plan to socialism and Bush’s overtly racist Willie Horton ad come to mind first.
Even if the Democrats aren’t interested in rescuing themselves from their string of one-term presidencies, they owe the country some seriously aggressive ideological shrillness. In the interest of public service, here’s what I’m talking about:
ATTACK AD 1: “They Hate You” (30 seconds)
Show cameras sweeping across sea of white faces at Republican National Convention, interspersed with Ku Klux Klan rallies, Nazis goose-stepping, blacks being attacked by dogs in the South, cross-burnings, piles of bodies at Auschwitz, and then panning across Republicans in Congress, especially Jesse Helms.
VOICE-OVER: America’s Republican Party. They’ve come a long way since Lincoln, haven’t they?”
TEXT: Anti-welfare. No funding for AIDS research. Anti-affirmative action. Against raising the minimum wage.
VOICE-OVER: “Republicans hate ordinary people. They hate blacks. They hate gays. They hate women. They hate people who work for a living. The odds are, they hate you. And why shouldn’t they? You’re not like them. They’re rich. Powerful. Mean.”
Show George Bush golfing and Bob Dole at a black-tie dinner. Cut to exclusive estates in wealthy suburb.
VOICE-OVER: “If you don’t live like them, don’t vote like them. This message sponsored by the Democratic National Committee.”
ATTACK AD 2: “Domestic Violence” (30 seconds)
Show shots of O.J. Simpson being tried for murder, photos of Nicole Simpson with bruises on her face. Cut to shots of Ronald Reagan, Newt Gingrich and Bob Dole. Then show all four men’s faces together, “Brady Bunch”-style.
VOICE-OVER: “What do these four men have in common? They treat women like crap.”
First, zero in on Reagan.
VOICE-OVER: “Ronald Reagan was accused of showing up drunk at a young starlet’s home back in the 1950s and raping her. Later, when he got married, he abandoned his first wife, Jane Wyman, and let his son Ron, Jr. live on food stamps rather than help him through college.”
Next, show Gingrich.
VOICE-OVER: “Newt Gingrich served his faithful first wife with divorce papers in the hospital while she was recovering from a cancer operation. Why? Because she wasn’t flashy enough for him to be seen with in Washington after he became a big-shot. Then she had to take him to court to force him to pay child support.”
Then show Dole.
VOICE-OVER: “Bob Dole? He dumped his first wife too. So the next time some Republican starts talking about family values, remember what kind of family values he’s talking about. America’s Republicans: Anti-woman. Anti-child. Anti-family. Paid for by Democrats to Re-elect President Clinton.”
Now there’s some ideological shrillness to make American politics exciting again.
(Ted Rall, author of Waking Up In America (St. Martin’s Press, 1992) and All The Rules Have Changed (Rip Off Press, 1995), is a syndicated editorial cartoonist and freelance writer.)
© 1996 Ted Rall All Rights Reserved
SYNDICATED COLUMN: So Much for Democracy
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Is a Clinton Victory Worth the Cost?
My involvement with the Democratic Party started at age 9, when my mom took me along to pass out McGovern-Shriver leaflets door-to-door in our solidly Republican neighborhood. “The Democrats,” my mother explained, “are the party of the people. Republicans only care about rich big-shots.” Nothing I have seen since 1972 has contradicted the latter part of that summary of our two-party system. Watching my mom’s enthusiasm while she tried to reason with our neighbors and dialed number after number in the dingy campaign headquarters in downtown Dayton convinced me that there really was a chance of ousting President Nixon—a man, who all attempts at historical revisionism notwithstanding, was the devil. My fourth-grade class held a mock election that fall. There were 32 little Nixonites to my one Democratic vote.
I quickly learned that, in America, Democrats usually lose, even when they win. Jimmy Carter squeaked by Ford in 1976—an astonishing fact when you consider the unelected incumbent’s corrupt pardon deal and idiotic demeanor—and never enjoyed a mandate to act like a real Democrat. The great Reagan defense build-up actually began in 1978 under Carter, along with draft registration and the U.S. refusal to attend the 1980 Olympics because of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. I was convinced that Carter lost in 1980 because these compromises had lost him his party’s liberal base, but I still worked for Mondale and Dukakis as they continued to pursue watered-down liberalism, organizing college students and dodging New York cops while wheat-pasting posters in the subways.
The capitalism run-amok excesses of the Reagan and Bush years made it easier to be a Democrat again—by the time 1992 rolled around, there was nothing more important to the country’s political and financial health than getting George Herbert Hoover Walker Bush out of the White House. The day after the election, a reporter called me to ask my reaction. “I feel like an evil cloud has lifted from the country,” I told him as I scribbled file labels at one of my three jobs. “Americans have rejected the idea that caring about other people is a sign of weakness.” I really did feel that way.
Which brings me to November 5th, when I will not be voting for Bill Clinton.
I am personally better off than I was four years ago, but the country has continued to go to hell. The reasons are simple. Given the first chance in a century to get national health protection passed, he blew it by proposing an outlandish scheme designed to protect insurance-company profits. Then he signed NAFTA and GATT, treasonous free trade deals that sell out American workers for the benefit of his corporate pals’ bottom lines. Even Reagan and Bush never pushed hard on NAFTA. To be sure, he did the right thing by sending troops to Bosnia, but he waited so long that the people they were sent to protect were all dead by the time they got there.
Clinton’s 1995 copresidency with Newt Gingrich was an embarrassment, but the last straw was his cynical election-year betrayal of the poor by eliminating welfare without creating the jobs to replace it.
My friends argue that a vote for Ralph Nader or Ross Perot—or for that matter, opting to stay home and watch TV—is a vote for Bob Dole. In a rigid two-party system, they’re right, but so what? Even if there were a chance that Dole could be elected, he and Clinton are both essentially the same: Both are pro-business, pro-choice and deficit-obsessed. A Dole Administration might cost the nation a few progressive appellate judges, but on the issues that really matter, most Americans wouldn’t notice much difference.
Furthermore, casting a protest vote, or not voting at all, is an effective means of telling the mainstream parties that you’re not interested in what they’re offering. While low voter turnout allows “winners” to claim mandates at press conferences, they know that the truth is that their message isn’t selling. While it may mean supporting a “spoiler” in the short term, it can force the big parties to reevaluate their directions.
This year, voting for Clinton potentially tells him that you agree with everything he’s done so far when you’re actually voting for the anti-Dole. If you support NAFTA and guaranteed unemployment and making children homeless, fine. But our republic wasn’t intended to have voters support the lesser of two evils—or likely winners simply because they’re likely to win. If you substantially disagree with Clintonism, you have a moral obligation as a citizen to vote for someone else. If no other candidate else appeals to you, your duty is to stay home.
Some people may question how I could abandon the Democrats after all this time. But I never left the party—it left me.
(Ted Rall, a syndicated cartoonist and freelance writer based in New York City, was a 1996 Pulitzer Prize finalist.)
© 1996 Ted Rall, All Rights Reserved
