Strange way to choose a president
LEVEL PLAYING FIELD
The Hindu, 13 January
The world looks on at the US presidential primaries with a mix of hopes and fears, and not a little bemusement.
The road to the White House is serpentine, its course laid out by an amalgam of federal and sate law, constitutional interpretation by the courts, party regulations, custom, and media imperatives. In the horse race that ensues, presentation and positioning easily trump policy. As a dramatic spectacle, the primaries can provide rich entertainment; but as a coherent democratic process, they are wanting.
For a start, the whole thing rests on an arithmetic of apples and pears. In some states, only registered Democrats and Republican may take part in their respective primary elections. In others, independents may choose which party primary they wish to vote in. In yet others, anyone may vote in either primary, regardless of which party they are registered with. Still others do not have primaries but caucuses, which unlike the others are not secret ballots.
Then there’s the staggered schedule. Iowa and New Hampshire come first, and may winnow out contenders and make or break insurgents. Yet they are states with small and unrepresentative populations, disproportionately rural and white. A small electorate ends up making very big decisions, while a much larger one watches and waits.
Being a registered Democrat or Republican is not like being a member of a mass party in other democracies. It requires only a check mark on the electoral registration form. There are no dues, no integration in a structure, and no requirement or even expectation of party loyalty.
Primaries arose in the early twentieth century as an attempt to reform Tammany Hall politics, to break the grip of unaccountable party apparatuses. But it was only in 1952, with television and Eisenhower’s break-through win in New Hampshire, that presidential primaries assumed something like their current importance. Conceived as instruments of party democracy, in practise they have dissolved concrete avenues of representation and accountability, and made two-party politics the captive creature of big money and big media.
The US Constitution makes no mention of political parties or general elections. It stipulates that the president be selected by an electoral college comprised of representatives chosen by the separate state legislatures, with the number of votes cast by each state determined by its total representation in the Senate and the House of Representatives. Since all states of whatever size have two senators and at least on representative, less populous states states enjoy disproportionate weight. In 2004, eight western and mid-western states (Montana, North and South Dakota, Nebraska, Idaho, Wyoming, Nevada and Utah), with a combined population of about 10 million, cast a total of 31 electoral college votes for Bush, the same number as New York, with a population nearly twice as large, was able to cast for Kerry. What’s more, in a winner takes all system, each state’s delegation casts its vote en bloc for the candidate securing a plurality of votes in the state. It is therefore possible for a candidate to secure the most votes and still lose the presidency, as happened to Al Gore in 2000.
Back in 1787, the US constitution was a hugely innovative document, but it is now badly in need of modernisation. It was the creation of the major vested interests of the time – southern slave holders and northern merchants, bankers and manufacturers – and in its provisions presumed and aimed to ensure continuing elite (male, white and wealthy) dominance. Much of its is designed to check and channel popular power. It has nothing like the guarantees of social and economic rights found in more up to date constitutions; it does not offer the kind of clear-cut federal distribution of power found in the German or Indian constitutions. To this day, there is no uniform system of local government in the USA; in its place, citizens are confronted by a wide variety of idiosyncratci arrangements and overlapping and confused jurisdictions.
The volatility and sheer disarray of the primaries provides openings in an otherwise closed governmental system dominated by monied interests. In the 80s, Jesse Jackson took advantage of these to mount a counter-Reaganite offensive. But to run any kind of effective primary campaign requires huge sums of money. It also requires, at the least, acceptance by the corporate-owned media that dominate the US public sphere, and that comes at a price.
Despite the famous weakness of classical political ideology in American politics, abstractions are the staple of presidential elections. And Barak Obama has specialised in their deployment. He aims not just to voice but somehow to embody the grand themes of “change”, “hope”, “renewal”, but in doing so has largely avoided the policy questions that would have to be addressed to make any of these broad themes politically meaningful.
Although Obama, unlike Hillary Clinton, shared the good sense of the global majority in opposing the Iraq invasion in 2003, neither candidate has specified how their policy on Iraq today would be different from Bush’s; they do not support the rapid withdrawal of US troops that the majority of the US public would like to see. Neither has mounted a serious challenge to Bush’s sabre-rattling on Iran; both broadly accept the maintenance of overwhelming US global military superiority and its use as an instrument of foreign policy. Crucially, both are strongly committed to continued US support for Israel, which not only means no relief for the increasingly desperate Palestinians, but no let up in the global conflict between the US and much of the rest of the world.
The fact that an African-American can mount a mainstream political challenge and secure mass support from whites is undoubtedly a significant one in a country where racism has played such a huge part in political formations. And that 90,000 Iowans braved the winter cold to stand up for Obama – doubling previous turn outs – shows once again that Americans will seize on the primary system, when they can, to express their hunger for reform. But at the end of the process they are unlikely to get what they want.
Take away Obama’s blackness, and his campaign is classically centrist. He is a self-proclaimed believer in “American exceptionalism” and has made the promise of a new American “unity” central to his appeal. In couching his call for change as a return to American norms, he follows long-established custom, on both left and right.
Invocations of American values and America’s special heritage are standard fare in Americna politics, yet paradoxically Americans remain largely unaware of the features that actually make their society distinct among democracies: the absence of universal health care provision, the role of religion, the exorbitant military expenditure, the eccentric method of choosing a president. The vague but powerful discourse of the specialness of America, the required professions of allegiance to “Americanism”, make it harder for the populace of the USA to recognise and remedy their country’s historical and institutional shortcomings.
