Webdiary - Founded and Inspired by Margo Kingston

Can the American presidential election change anything? You betcha?
by Tony Phillips

While Australia’s Tuesday will be preoccupied with gambling of the horse racing kind (or saluting a money laundering industry if you want to be more frank about it), America’s Tuesday, our Wednesday, will be about a different, two horse, race. McCain versus Obama. So what are some distinctive points about this race.

Well, the first is that the vice presidential nominees matter a great deal more than they historically have. The recent importance of Cheney to Bush should not overshadow this. While Cheney assumed many presidential functions, and embarked on deceit, torture and the subversion of the American liberties and human rights generally, he didn’t actually become President. Both the current candidates for President, McCain and Obama, have a real question mark over their longevity, McCain simply because of his age: it seems reasonable to assume that death or advancing mental incapacity may intrude on his four year term. Then again, Reagan managed to limp through to the end, despite an obviously failing mind. In Obama’s case it is the more sombre reality of the habit of American assassination, and in particular the history of a gun-crazed nation that has routinely killed uppity blacks, that is cause for concern. Joe Biden’s fate might thus be Lyndon Johnson’s. As for Palin, well, the thought is blanching (sic). Presumably another Cheney like figure, even Cheney himself, would emerge to do the real running of the White House. Palin really could be a complete re-run of Bush.

Another point concerns international affairs and foreign policy. Obama is well ahead on world opinion polls and in Western countries no doubt this has something to do with his environmental credentials. More broadly he is viewed as likely to retreat from Bush’s wild hubris and neo-colonial adventures, not to mention policies of war, torture and terror. Yet this view rests on a largely wishful interpretation. While Obama is doubtless running a more conservative line than he is likely to pursue in office, his ability or willingness to shift American foreign policy is not going to be as great as many assume.

Like Kevin Rudd, he has opted for the politically astute but policy stupid Iraq bad, Afghanistan good, discourse. In reality, both are nightmarish and almost futile wars, though Iraq actually has slightly more chance of success. In general, neither is likely to end soon in something that could be called victory and both will continue to eat money, or rather shovel profits to the expanded military-industrial-complex. There will also be many more dead innocents and some dead American and even Australian soldiers. Moreover, at this stage Obama still embraces a policy that treats the “war on terror” as real. Even more worryingly, he seems to accept the new post Powell American policy of (un)targeted murders and other interventions anywhere in the world it sees fit. A worldview that sees it as acceptable that anyone, anywhere, can become a victim of American state sanctioned violence if the American presidential executive deems it will help their never to be finished “war on terror”.

McCain, surrounded by neo-conservative advisers like Robert Kagan and John Bolton, who were players in the whole Bush disaster, and accompanied by Palin, who is taking advice from the notorious and blood-covered Henry Kissinger, looks like Obama but worse. Obama likes to paint McCain as a continuance of Bush though it seems doubtful he could be as incompetent. Indeed, in foreign policy McCain might actually be robust enough to blindside the neo-conservatives and, as did Eisenhower, try and take some steps against the unholy alliance of neo-con ideologues and the military-industrial-complex. He might even, in an extreme maverick moment, move American policy away from torture and extra-judicial murders. Faced with a need to leverage a hostile Congress this might even make political sense. Remember McCain did, for a brief moment, stand up to the Bush administration over the matter of torture. As for Obama, while we might like to think he would roll back the expansion of Presidential power and arrogance built up by Bush it’s not at all clear he would. All that power will be mighty tempting. Congress’s actions and attitudes will be crucial here.

On the environment there is at least as clear a difference as there was between Rudd’s ALP and Howard’s Liberals in the last election. However, as we have since seen this it not much more than the difference between a dried out lawn covered in cracks and a dull straw matting with tinges of green. Better but not by mu(l)ch. If America does actually begin treating climate change seriously this would be an enormous step forward, and there is no doubt Obama is a better bet to do this than McCain. The latter remains firmly wedded to the old economy and his policies relating to the problem have included a desire to reduce petrol tax and the motto “drill baby drill”. Thus his solution for oil, in terms of its cost and sourcing, is simply to find more of it. Its environmental cost barely appears to register.

In terms of the economy, the big killer for McCain as Wall Street went bust, any examination of the policies of both candidates finds them extremely thin by Australian standards. Then again, the separate powers of the Congress and Presidency do muddy the waters more than they do in a parliamentary democracy like Australia. In the United States it is so often, “the President proposes and Congress disposes”. Even with a Democrat-controlled Congress Obama would not have smooth sailing. All this means much less policy detail is trotted out at election time. Budgets are far more about negotiations with vested interests in the United States. However, it is not unreasonable to surmise the level of debt, foreign and domestic, private and public, will hang like a thundercloud over all US budgets for the next four years. But if anything is to be done to curb the excesses of inequality in America (levels unprecedented since 1929), history says the Democrats are a better bet. However Obama, like Clinton, may find his administration is mostly devoted to cleaning up Republican fiscal irresponsibility.

Obama has put health care back on the agenda. Domestically this is America’s biggest policy failure, its health system is largely an inefficient, ineffective and inequality creating rort. The USA spends almost twice as much as a percentage of its GDP on health care than most other developed countries. Yet the United States leaves about 45 million of its people with no health cover whatsoever and the rest pay relatively high prices to receive services mostly below those they would receive for similar outlays in Australia, Canada, Britain, Germany etc. But this big private and corporatised sector is extremely jealous of its profits and has been highly successful in resisting reform. Consequently Obama’s reform plans are mild and distinctly not socialistic, opting for a continuation, even expansion, of privatised schemes and Public-Private Partnerships. These are everywhere mechanisms for the channelling of taxpayer monies into private purses. Thus such policy by Obama is to feed the hand that will continue to bite, nay gnaw, on him and ordinary Americans for as long as they suffer it. McCain has no answers on health except his general answer to everything, tax cuts.

Overall either leader would offer a more competent administration than the current one but then, with the bar set so low, how could they not? Barack Obama claims its time for a change, and John McCain wants to stand up for America. In the case of Obama the question is the degree to which he would lead real change, as opposed to his being elected just standing for it, indeed his mere election standing in place of it. In the case of McCain the question is, which America is he standing up for? If “Joe the plumber” is any guide it’s that very small percentage earning over US$250,000 a year.