Gary Younge (Guardian Utd): Divided against itself

[Jack Rabbit]

From the Guardian Unlimited (UK)
Dated Monday October 4

Divided against itself
If Americans choose Bush over Kerry, it will be from fear, a lack of choice - and a preference for power over safety
By Gary Younge

If you're interested in who's going to be the next US president then forget the precedents. If history is anything to go by, both John Kerry and George Bush will win. No candidate who lost the popular vote but won the presidency (John Quincy Adams, 1824; Rutherford B Hayes 1876; Benjamin Harrison, 1888; George Bush, 2000) has ever been re-elected. But then no president has failed to be re-elected during a major war.
Since 1964, every incumbent with approval ratings below 50% in the spring of the year when they are running for re-election, which would include Bush, has lost. But then every incumbent who has had an approval rating above 50% at this stage, which would include Bush, has won. The truth is that nobody can predict the outcome of the presidential election. The polls are too volatile, the margins too close and the context in which they are being conducted too precarious. Anything from a large mortar attack in Iraq that kills several US soldiers (Iraqi casualties appear to have little impact on US public opinion) to a plant closure in Ohio could tip the balance either way.

Kerry has started to bounce back, helped in part by a strong debate performance. But for now, Bush is the narrow favourite. That forces the rest of us to wrestle with the prospect of four more years of the most rightwing administration most can remember. What should the world make of America and Americans if Bush wins?

In 2000, such a prospect was unpleasant but far less alarming. If anything, the world was more concerned by his unilateral withdrawal from the global arena (reneging on treaties like Kyoto) than his unilateral intervention into it. Moreover, the manner in which Bush assumed power - selected by judges rather than elected by people - denied him absolute legitimacy in the world's eyes and helped us differentiate him from the people he claimed to represent.

This time things are different.

Read more.

[muriel_volestrangler]

1. dupe

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[Wind Dancer]

2. More

-snip-

This time things are different. Since September 11 2001, Americans have been forced to take a closer look at the world around them. Over the past two years they have seen their government prosecute an illegal war in a nation where they are unwelcome occupiers and flout the will of the UN, and their soldiers torture Iraqis in Abu Ghraib prison. In short, they have seen loathing for their country grow around the globe - even among those they once counted as allies - and more than a thousand of their countrymen killed in combat. If they lost their innocence on September 11 - never a particularly convincing assertion - then they cannot have it back now.

If Bush wins fair and square on November 2, then what conclusions can we draw about a nation that consciously decides this is the course it wants to take? We might start by ruling out a few. First, it will not mean that Americans are stupid. They aren't. Compared with the rest of the world, they are pretty well educated and certainly no more stupid than Britons, French or Portuguese were when they had an empire. Nor will it mean they have been duped. They haven't. They have been lied to constantly and their mainstream media has served them poorly, particularly over weapons of mass destruction, the connection between al-Qaida and Saddam Hussein, and the Middle East.

But in a nation where the internet is widely available, and films, books and radio stations present other opinions, Americans have had access to a wide range of viewpoints, including Howard Dean and Michael Moore. True, dissident voices have been marginalised. But they have not been extinguished - and, if anything, have grown more mainstream in the past year. So if Americans come away from the plurality of opinions with which they have been presented to back Bush, it will not be because they did not know that other views were out there, but because they chose to believe one set of views over others.

-snip-

The country is riven on almost every axis possible - between red states (for Bush) and blue states (for Kerry), between the religious and the secular, the metro and the retro. "Not since the civil war has the country been so divided," argues John White, professor of politics at the Catholic University of America. Whether Bush wins or loses, these rifts will endure. America is not just a nation at war with the world; it is a nation at war with itself.

[Moderator]

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