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Date: 11 Nov 1996 18:19:40
Reply-To: Conference "zamir.chat" 
From: Ivo Skoric 
Subject: Re: Post Festum
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From: "Ivo Skoric" 

TweedleBob and TweedleBill

America's election night is also known as a Guy Fawkes night - a night
for burning the effigies of bad spirits of the old year (besides the Guy
himself), to clear the path to the new year.  It was always about change. 
Yet incumbents won this year almost in all races.  Is there anything left
of the American wild pagan spirit?

Dole-Clinton is not a battle between the right and left, much less
between the right and wrong as their campaign specialist too often try to
present.  They are not extremists, they are not radicals, not even
moderately.  There is nothing outstanding about any of them, except
their mediocrity.  They both talk change, yet the change is the last thing
on their mind.  They both spend their adult lives in politics, making me
think of them as of two sides of the same coin.  The scary part is that
they do not have opposition, except for a nutty billionaire whose ears
remind of a Disney cartoon character.  Oh, yeah, there is also Ralph
Nader, but he doesn't want to believe that he is really a candidate.

This campaign (Republicans vs.  Democrats) pretty much developed into
every four years more ungainly power struggle between two powerful
mainstream U.S. bureaucracies: private enterprise and public sector,
which are politically represented by Republican and Democratic party
respectively.  Republican stronghold is corporate America, while
Democrats command the votes from the vast quasi-corporate world of
governmental and non-governmental social structures like: minorities,
women, labor, environment, education, health services, human rights,
most of the media, socially conscious (or those who want to be seen as
such) entertainers, etc.

Both bureaucracies are willing to spend an equivalent of some small
African country GNP on the campaign: this election year would be
remembered by a record - for political race in entire human history -
spending of close to 3/4 billion dollars by both parties, all in order to
attract less than 50% of electorate - 49% - a fact that basically makes the
mandate of the president-elect questionable.  Sensing that, Clinton
immediately offered a bipartisan rule, trying to pre-empt the inevitable
gridlock of him running into a Congress run by the new-generation
Republicans for whom the Pope is too controversial and Bill Graham is
too liberal.

The broadening of political platform, however, makes us wonder why
did we have elections then.  In the Soviet era there was only one party
and all elected officials were from that Party.  Although it was not
illegal, it was made technically impossible for a non-member to run in
any elections.  The U.S. political system is apparently quite similar -
with a substantial difference that there are TWO instead of one party. 
Nevertheless, if we would have a government run bipartisanly, then that
difference would be lost.  History did not favor Soviet system (it
painfully collapsed as we all witnessed), so I don't see a point in
repeating a mistake.

Where is then place for our vote?  I mean us who are equally despised
with both of those increasingly similar bureaucratic worlds.  I mean us -
the majority, 51% of voters.  Whom should we vote for?  Why there are
no more viable winning options?  Isn't this just cosmetically and
superficially different from the one party choice I had in Yugoslavia: a
two party choice.  So, people like me chose not to vote and the self-appointed cradle of democracy is shaking, because every four years less
and less people show up to vote, and new presidents are regularly elected
to office by an actual minority (20+%!).

Therefore candidates try to attract people.  Money is the key.  Money
pays TV time.  Money buys favors.  It doesn't matter where it comes
from, be it Indonesia if you like.  Candidates would use every other
opportunity that is available to them, too.  Like the eerie coincidence of
Russian president having a quintuple bypass open heart surgery on the
American elections eve: an American surgeon (DeBakey) was sent there
to advise postponing surgery until Yeltsin is  prepared', which
miraculously happened on that particular night.  CNN ended each report
about Yeltsin with the sentence explaining who holds the codes to launch
nuclear weapons - when they were transferred to Chernomyrdin and
when they were returned to Yeltsin - underlining the fear of Russian
nuclear warheads that after the long years of cold war still play an
important role in American minds, despite the fact that most of the
Russian missiles and warheads are probably obsolete and useless
anyway.  With an uncertainty of situation in Russia - Yeltsin might have
died and been succeeded by nationalist or a communist unfriendly to the
U.S. - an American voter was more likely to vote for the incumbent
president.  Delaying of Yeltsin's surgery proved to be a good home run
for Clinton.

Candidates of  today  try to present themselves as cool.  Because
coolness sells well with those who don't bother to vote (young).  Clinton
went so far to volunteer on MTV that he'd inhale if he could (meaning
give me 4 more years and I'd inhale or do whatever else you want). 
Dole doesn't want to be seen as trailing Clinton far behind in stupid
stunts: he stage-dived.  Still, this is all just marketing.  Substantially
they are both offering us a slightly different form of status-quo - a status-quo that for us means not to be able to pay our rents very soon, and not
to be able to turn anywhere for help when that happens, squeezed
between ever increasing prices of products and services and sluggishly
stagnating wages and evaporating social services - particularly for
documentedly undereducated (whereas documented education - meaning
getting a fucking diploma - costs more and more money every year).

That's their vision and that's the future we get regardless of whom we
vote for.  I wonder if candidates see that, or are they too consumed with
the elaborate day-to-day minutiae of the campaigning.  While they are
busy crossing their T's, the crowd is angrier and angrier each passing
day.

What is next?  Let's take a clue from the Serbian president Slobodan
Milosevic.  Serbia is now a "federal multiparty republic", pretty much
like the U.S. Yet, the second largest political party in Serbia (JUL) is
headed by Mirjana Markovic, Slobodan Milosevic's wife.  Slobodan
Milosevic run on a ticket of Serbian Democratic Party (SDS).  Before
the elections he and his wife formed the coalition and won.  Zajedno, the
coalition of thirtysomething other opposition parties won a negligible
percentage of votes.  Dragoslav Avramovic, former head of Yugoslav
Federal Reserve Bank and a second most popular politician in Serbia,
withdrew from being an opposition candidate running on the Zajedno
ticket just before the elections, citing health reasons (he was, perhaps,
promised by Milosevic to die soon after elections if he would run).  Can
you imagine how much more this year's elections would be humorous if
Hillary and Bill run on two separate tickets?

ivo