PRESIDENTIAL CAMPAIGN? THAT WAS AFTER THE ELECTION
Throughout the autumn, Americans endured the most boring election campaign in living memory. The candidates, dubbed Gush and Bore for their insubstantial contribution to the debate. Though the form was a contest, the content was missing. Differences between the candidates were minimal. Appeals to the traditional constituencies of either party were deliberately left understated, so as not to jeopardize the imagined 'middle ground'. With little organic relationship to the electorate, the candidates painted their appeal as blandly and as broadly as they could.
Once the polls had closed, and the voters vacated the field, the real contest started. At last the experts, media pundits, and judges could get down to the real business of telling the public what their decision was. First the network stations announced the result on the basis of sample exit polls, first for Gore and then for Bush. Then the election officials made decisions about what constituted a vote cast. Then the Florida courts, and finally the Supreme Court were called in to decide the result.
As long as the real electorate was at issue, the candidates had been paralysed by caution, fearful of being too strident, for fear of provoking a reaction. But once the debate turned from convincing the electorate to second-guessing their decision, the campaigns sprung into life. Al Gore, so wooden during the campaign was transformed from a tree stump into Petrocelli, fighting for every decision in every court. George W Bush, who throughout the campaign hid behind a winsome boyish smile, suddenly started to assume an uncharacteristically presidential gravitas. The lesson was clear. Both candidates felt more at home presenting their case to officials and judges, to interpret the imaginary electorate, than they ever did talking to real voters. Even radical democrat Jesse Jackson, sidelined throughout the campaign for fear of provoking a backlash to his strident activism was allowed to organize big demonstrations demanding a recount. But the time to fight the election campaign ought to have been before the votes were cast, not after.
Only losers call for the umpire. The trend to fight political campaigns through the courts has been characteristic of political elites who have lost their will to win over voters. When the US right was out in the cold during the Clinton presidency, they directed their attentions to impeachment and the Starr enquiry as a substitute for winning real support. In Britain, left-wingers in the era of Tory preeminence tried to change the constitution, in frustration at failing to convince the populace. In Austria, opponents of Jorg Haider, shocked at having lost the election, tried to stop him from governing by appealing ot the international community to isolate him. In Italy the left, agitated over the right-wing constituencies mobilized by media mogul Silvio Berlusconi, sought to have him forced out of office by the judges, rather than convincing the voters - now Berlusconi is set to win in Italy, because no popular opposition has been forged. The separation between political elites and voters is creating a growing role for judges and lawyers in determining the outcome of political contests.
CONSENSUS POLITICS? NO THANKS
The natural conclusion to the American contest appears to be a new consensus politics. Pundits have already suggested a mixed administration of Democrats as well as Republicans, and the new President is promising an ethnically and possibly politically plural team. Having thrown away the election, Democratic activists are demanding that the President include some of their own, and distance himself from the fundamentalist right.
Consensus sounds attractive to people who are repulsed by difficult arguments and disagreements. But it was the lack of contestation that created the problem in the US election, not a surfeit of it. A coalition cabinet would only institutionalize the lack of purpose in the US political scene. Anyone who is seriously interested in advancing a radical political agenda has noting to gain from fudging the issues and entrenching the politics of the Middle Ground - which are in any event a media construct, not a real constituency.
HOW MANY YOBS CAN DANCE ON A PINHEAD?
The British election campaign hotted up as Tory leader William Hague blasted politically correct social workers and criminologists for creating the 'Yob Culture'. Hague's speech is a reply to government minister Peter Mandelson's charge that the 'Yob Culture' was created by years of Tory rule, when, supposedly, public order broke down under the corrosive effect of selfish individualism.
The debate about who started the Yob Culture makes as much sense as the apocryphal debate amongst medieval theologians as to how many angels can dance on the head of a pin. There is no Yob Culture - except in the fevered imaginations of politicians and newspapers trying to win an audience by frightening old ladies.
In particular Hague is mistaken in thinking that the MacPherson report charging institutional police racism is responsible for demoralizing the police. Of course MacPherson's report demoralized some policemen, and thousands left the Metropolitan Force. But the whole effect of the MacPherson report is to clear out the old guard of police officers trained in the 1980s, when a considerable part of police work was a race war against immigrant communities. Nowadays, the strategy is to criminalize much wider sections of the community, like young people, so the police need to get rid of the old dead wood to make for newer and younger recruits better in tune with the times. -- James Heartfield