[WS:] I think this is an expression of fatalistic attitudes that for ages have been well entrenched in Eastern European societies, rather than a political strategy of any kind. It is a different way of dealing with uncertainty, if you will. Russians, and Eastern Europeans in general, tend to cognitvely push it away, relegate it ot the other world so to speak, so it appears to them as if did not cencern their everyday lives. Americans, by contrast, engage in can-do rituals, which include electioneering, petitionig the governemnt, organizaing of various kinds to create an illusion that they are in control. However, both cognitive illusions work to the same end - a perception that what seems a menacing force that one does not understand is not threatening one's everyday life.
As to your comment about letting the system here running "its course" - I find it a rather simplistic view of society, economy and polity. There is certainly more at stake than the contol of the White House, and nothing is preordained by the system - unles of course one is a fatalist. Wojtek
--------------------------------------------------------------- "When a candidate for public office faces the voters he does not face men of sense; he faces a mob of men whose chief distinguishing mark is the fact that they are quite incapable of weighing ideas, or even of comprehending any save the most elemental — men whose whole thinking is done in terms of emotion, and whose dominant emotion is dread of what they cannot understand. So confronted, the candidate must either bark with the pack or be lost. [...] All the odds are on the man who is, intrinsically, the most devious and mediocre — the man who can most adeptly disperse the notion that his mind is a virtual vacuum. The Presidency tends, year by year, to go to such men." - HL Mencken ----------------------------------------------------------------