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archived: 12 - 18 Dec, 2004 Back Next UPDATED: December 14, 2004 GRASSROOTS REVOLT 12th December 2004 – the fourth anniversary of the end of American democracy Four years ago today, an era in American democracy came to an abrupt close. This was the date that the United States Supreme Court ruled that the counting of votes in Florida must be halted. The bottom line is that American citizens retain their right to vote, but they do not have the right to have their votes counted. The counting of votes is not an individual right in Bush’s America: it is the right of the states to tabulate votes according to their political persuasions. Last week, Jesse Jackson argued on Capitol Hill for a Voting Rights Amendment to the Constitution to guarantee that every vote cast in US elections is counted. At this point, Jackson’s proposal has the support of the Black Caucus, but little more. Senator John Kerry has not endorsed Jackson’s proposal for a voting rights amendment, nor has Senator John Edwards and neither has the outgoing Chairman of the Democratic National Committee, Terry McAuliffe. These may be some of the reasons why, in Democratic Party terms, the grassroots are now in revolt. Eli Pariser, head of MoveOn, is well on the way to sacking Terry McAuliffe and his nest of New Democrats who have plunged the Party into its longest series of losses since the Civil War and Reconstruction. In a previous comment, I have noted that the New Democratic movement has never won an election. They have touted their political prowess as the architects of the two presidential victories of Bill Clinton. Wrong. Even though Clinton was a charter member of the New Democratic movement that had nothing whatsoever to do with either of his victories. The Party, America and the world can thank Ross Perot for both of Clinton's wins. Perot's campaigns severed a core of right-wing zealots from the Republican power base in both 1992 and 1996. Clinton never won fifty percent of the vote. Neither did the New Democrats have anything to do with Clinton's winning the nomination in 1992. They can thank James Carville and George Stephanopoulos for that one. Carville masterminded Clinton's primary campaign, not by positioning him in the center-right of a field of candidates, but by his brilliant crisis management of the Jennifer Flowers affair. People identified not only with Clinton, but also with Hillary. In the Clintons, America saw a talented but imperfect pair of human beings who deserved a second chance. Calling himself the 'Comeback Kid" and admitting to problems in their marriage, Clinton made the political connection on the strength of his own personal integrity. He had the will power and the common sense to admit his humanity and his imperfections. That was something new in American politics, and it spoke volumes to the main-streets of America. Call it charisma or what you will, Bill Clinton became the quintessential American, an everyman who spoke the language of the average American. He even had the honesty to admit that he was a man who could feel the pain of his people. With Clinton securely in the White House, the New Democrats masterminded the campaign of 1994 by running to the Republican center-right, and Newt Gingrich's Contract on America was the immediate result. The New Democrats lost; the radical religious Republican right won, and the rest is history. Eli Pariser is dead right. The New Democrats, the Democratic Leadership Council and the center-right tendency have alienated the party of FDR, JFK, LBJ, HHH and Jimmy Carter from the grassroots. The New Democrats can talk all they want about economic issues as the populist road back to power, but that will not work until America is in the throes of another depression. Another theory frequently touted by the New Democrats is that of values voters. This values based argument tells us that Democrats need to be more zealously religious and spiritual in their quest for the support of mainstream America. This is just a coded message advocating deplorable policies including: racism, sexism and creationism. The New Democrats seem to have forgotten the religious conviction of Jimmy Carter, our last liberal president. There are plenty of Americans who did not vote in this election, because they simply could not see the point. They rejected the messages of both Bush and Kerry. Hindsight is always 20/20, but the message of a candidate who voted for the war but ran in opposition to it, and then said that he voted for the eighty-seven billion dollars before he voted against it was simply not plausible enough to be taken seriously somewhere on main street. The Real Deal of John Kerry did not seem real, but the New Democrats heralded it as their very own construction. In this attribution, they were right. They vociferously lauded Kerry and Edwards as their dream New Democratic ticket. To the mainstream, Kerry’s message seemed like a double talking deal of dubious veracity. The New Democratic Party line is just that – all political double talk and no trousers. For their parts, Rove and the Republicans have been laughing ever since Kerry surged to the front of the pack in Iowa. They knew then that they could label him a serial flip-flopper, and he would repeatedly oblige them with doublespeak. They did, he did, and it worked. Simple as that. Even with a deeply compromised candidate who was running a dubious excuse for a campaign, over fifty million people voted - not for John Kerry but against George Bush. Try as he might, Kerry did not have a message until he took Clinton's and Carville's advice and began attacking Bush for his disastrous war policies. Kerry had little choice at that point, because his New Democrat campaign had tanked in the polls only one month after his nominating convention had fizzled with the most minute bounce in recorded history. It is worth remembering that during his acceptance speech, Kerry leveled a warning directly at his opponent, George Bush. Kerry boldly warned Bush that he would stand up against any attempt to violate the constitution. Standing up against immense odds when he was up to thirteen points down in the polls, Kerry rose to the occasion, and he performed brilliantly in the debates. With a reversal of the tides of momentum, he did have a ghost of a chance. Then, Osama Bin Laden popped out of the Jack-in-the-box right on his Rovian cue, and the tides of momentum developed into a fear driven back-lashing riptide, or so we are being asked to believe. Based on exhaustive demographic analysis, John Zogby and other reputable pollsters predicted Kerry would win the election. Today, Zogby's organization is backing the Congressional probe launched by John Conyers and Mel Watt into the integrity of the vote and the voting process in America. The point here being, we really do not know who won this election, but we certainly know who lost it. John Kerry has repeatedly conceded and re-conceded. Jesse Jackson was the star player at the Conyers-Watt briefing for members of Congress last week. Jackson hurled some pithy comments at John Kerry criticizing him for not standing up and fighting for voting rights and the integrity of the electoral process. The message here is not heavily coded, but it safe to conclude that it will be unlikely that John Kerry will enjoy any palpable Afro-American support in his next run for the presidency. As stated at the beginning of this column, it was on this date in 2000 that the Supreme Court ruled against Albert Gore and the voting rights of the American people. For the nine weeks between the day of the election and the Supreme Court decision, Albert Gore defended the voting rights of average Americans. Al Gore stood up against the earthly powers arrayed against him, and he fought down to the wire for the integrity of American democracy. John Kerry did nothing of the sort. Less than twenty-four hours after the polls closed, John Kerry collapsed into a tearful whimper on the stage of Faneuil Hall. Kerry collapsed and so did his campaign even though they could see an unprecedented number of reports of voting irregularities flooding into their inboxes from many battleground states. Worse. Kerry folded his campaign even though the exit polls in the key battleground states reported that he would definitely win the presidency. This unforeseeable psychological collapse of the Brahmin warrior that we knew as John Kerry of the Vietnam Veterans Against the War will be studied by generations of American historians for years to come. It simply does not compute. Kerry’s bold convention promise to stand up against Bush over constitutional rights disappeared into the ozone, a vapor that simply vanished when a barrage of statistics and complaints of a second stolen election hit him head on with the force of a freight train. Kerry collapsed and the trainwreck of American democracy is the direct result. It is exquisitely ironic that exit polling became the straw that broke the camel's back in the Ukrainian presidential election. Today, America is in the unenviable position of being a second-class democracy, inferior even to the former Soviet Republic of the Ukraine. The historical guilt for this political catastrophe will be shared equally between the Republicans who unscrupulously manipulated voting procedures in key battleground states and by John Kerry, along with his top New Democratic advisors who urged him to concede both rashly and prematurely in the face of the largest number of official allegations of election fraud in American history and the overwhelming tide of exit polls announcing him as the winner of the election. Joseph Lieberman and his staff should take a major amount of the blame for this series of events. On the morning after the election, Lieberman’s henchmen leapt eagerly in front of the cameras at Fox News where they lauded Bush’s victory by lampooning Kerry as a bad candidate with no message. To this day, Lieberman loves to validate the horrendous policies of George Bush. On the Republican side, it is difficult to name only one of the culprits other than the most obvious, Karl Rove, but Kenneth Blackwell does rise to prominence as an Afro-American product of affirmative action who was eager to disenfranchise voters from his own ethnic community in order to gain political advantage even if it came at the cost of democracy. For the Afro-American community, Kenneth Blackwell is a political Judas who is obviously headed for higher office in Ohio. American history has appointed an obscure attorney in Ohio named Clifford Arnebeck to lead the charge for voting rights. Affiliated with neither the Democratic National Committee nor the Kerry campaign, Arnebeck petitioned the courts in Ohio to throw out the suspicious election results. Arnebeck is critical of John Kerry. "I can't for the life of me understand why Kerry isn't fighting harder for this. Maybe it's some secret Skull and Bones tradition, where you're not supposed to show up the other guy," Arnebeck mused. Arnebeck’s comment is not the first time that the Yale secret society of which Bush and Kerry were both members has borne the brunt of sarcastic comments among Democrats. Looking forward, the Democratic Party must inspire those Americans alienated from voting by articulating what will always be our core message: We stand for the New Deal, the New Frontier, the Great Society, civil rights, voting rights, equal rights, gay rights and the progressive policies of the Carter and Clinton administrations. The grassroots are in revolt, and there are big changes in the pipeline. __________________ Since 1968, Michael Carmichael has been a professional political consultant. Beginning as a Student Coordinator for Robert F. Kennedy, he has worked in five US presidential campaigns as well as over 100 major American political campaigns for federal and state offices. In 1985, he founded The Oxford Centre for Public Affairs in the United Kingdom. In 2003, he founded The Planetary Movement Limited, a global political action organization based in the United Kingdom.
Last Update: 03/23/2006 |
