Primary Reaction: The Factions

This year US voters have been turning out in massive numbers to decide who will replace the second President Bush. Three primary factions seem to have emerged among the US electorate, all of whom are ignoring certain aspects of the preceding narrative to varying degrees for varying reasons.

The Republican Faction represents those who insist that on the whole, the second President Bush was on the right track and we must simply give his policies more time. The Clinton Faction is comprised of those who say the Bush Years were a tragic mistake and we need to get back to the illusory Clinton Utopia. The Obama Faction is people who believe the problems run deeper than what the other two factions are saying, though their approach currently lacks focus.

To my mind the Republican Faction is psychotically wrong (in the post-Super Fat Tuesday world it looks likely I can start calling them the McCainiacs). They have so completely lost sight of what the true problems facing the US that they are meta-ignorant (they don’t even know that they don’t know). They generally believe the primary problem facing the US is liberals and foreigners. I have the least use for the Republican Faction since they are the furthest from being able to see, let alone solve, the true problems facing the US. As such, I have a tendency to dismiss them hopeless.

The Clinton Faction is delusional in their idealization of the 90s, which I see as a profoundly squandered opportunity. The Clinton Faction is living in a dream. This dream is analogous to a female baseball player whose husband, who in the last game of his career as a ballplayer, struck out to cost his team the championship. The wife has a recurring dream thereafter in which sometimes her husband and sometime she hit a home run instead and won the championship.

In her waking world she is trying to get to the championship game while still believing this dream is real and those who say otherwise are playing mind games as a part of a vast conspiracy. Unfortunately, the pitcher who struck out her husband last time will be pitching against her in the championship with an even nastier arsenal of pitches. Ultimately the Clinton Faction believes that simply undoing the last 8 years will end our national nightmare and solve all that is wrong with the US.

The Obama Faction is also led by a dreamer. Their dream represents escaping from a terrible nightmare into a hazy world of limitless opportunity but not knowing how to exploit it. The haziness of Obama’s vision is in part based on the fact that it is about creating a new paradigm instead of a reaching a specific destination. A “Where” is always easier to articulate than a “How”.

The Obama Faction must realize that “change” is not the objective, advancement towards a specific ideal is. Getting out of the frying pan also represents change. While this faction seems to have the best appreciation of the fact that the problems facing the US run deeper than foreigners, liberals or the previous president, so far they seem to be more focused on the symptoms than the root cause. The Obama Faction has the right idea but does not seem to know precisely what to do with it.

Nonetheless, I qualify as a member of the Obama Faction by default. This is because, if history is any guide, the Republicans will never admit to being wrong and the Clintons will blame Republicans for everything that doesn’t go their way. Our situation is worsening by the day and we can no longer afford the luxury of such posturing.

The Republican and Clinton Factions are analogous to two doctors treating a cancer by each insisting that the patient will immediately get better if the other doctor is taken off the case. The Obama Faction is at least aware that a more substantive regimen will be required, though their leader is still short on specifics at this stage.

The potential I see in Senator Obama. It is not a potential that would be realized if he had the “experience” of a Senator McCain or a Senator Clinton. I see him as being the only person in the race who is even remotely capable of appreciating and thus addressing the true problems facing the US.

Primary Reaction: How Did We Get Here?

Now that Super Fat Tuesday is over I can unload some of how I have come to feel about this election and its implications for the future of the United States. But first some background:

• With the end of the Cold War the US was faced with a tremendous opportunity to unite the world in peace and prosperity. Arguably such an opportunity was unprecedented in all of human history.
• But George H. W. Bush, the president at the time, lacked “the Vision Thing” required to begin to take advantage of this opportunity and was kicked to the curb after one term in office.
• Unfortunately, due to early political missteps, reactionary pandering and an ultimate lack of a moral compass, the next president, Bill Clinton, managed to polarize the US political discourse, leaving the nation a political basket case as was demonstrated by the election of 2000 (anyone charging me with “blaming the victim” here needs to remember who was in charge at the time).
• Many US Democrats see Bill Clinton’s presidency as a near Utopian period that was only interrupted by term limits and his vice president’s inability to run a competent campaign. But these people generally lose sight of the fact that President Clinton was impeached, and while his crimes may not have arisen to the level of “high crimes and misdemeanors” he did lie under oath. President Clinton had a scandal-plagued administration and not all of it can be blamed on partisan Republicans creating something out of nothing.
• In addition, it should be noted that the economic revival of the late 90s that led to the first federal budget surpluses in decades, was primarily fueled by the end of the Cold War, the expansion of the Internet Bubble and Y2K-based expenditures, not by Clinton economic policies.
• The lasting legacy of President Clinton is that he made it easy for Republicans in general and conservatives in particular to see liberals and Democrats as not merely misguided, but as evil. This feeling was relatively one-sided until President Clinton’s successor was elected in 2000.
• The election and presidency of George W Bush made it easy for Democrats and liberals to demonize all things Republican, conservative and fundamentalist in return.
• The second President Bush upped the ante in his handling of the aftermath of the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. President Bush not only squandered another chance to unite the world in peace, he polarized the world stage in terms of “US versus Evil”. His so-called “War of Terror”, potentially ruinous Iraq policy and pandering to corporate interests run amok to the detriment of the shrinking US middle class have left the United States teetering on the edge of irrelevancy; the post-Cold War opportunity in tatters.