Can Anybody Here Run This Country?

One way to be certain that the 2004 presidential campaign is now in earnest is that the Democrats have begun looking for somebody to blame. Ralph Nader remains the likeliest suspect, although he recently announced that he will not be running for president on the Green Party ticket -- the much-chastened and cowed Greens were making it pretty clear he isn't welcome, anyway. The threat of an independent Nader candidacy remains as a ready excuse come summertime, when the Bush/Cheney/Rove juggernaut will be wrapped in flags, confetti, and depleted uranium, and the eventual Dem nominee will be running to the right as fast as possible, wondering what happened to his base.

But the more immediate project is the primary blame game, as the Dems' circular firing squad assembles in Iowa and, advised by their consultants that the one way to get the media to pay attention is to go negative, does so with a vengeance on the current front-runners, Howard Dean and Dick Gephardt. Like the old saw about crabs in a basket, the hangers-on are most focused on pulling down Dean, who has been accused of everything from secret deals with Enron (not formerly known as a major player in the Vermont economy) to being an apologist for Saddam Hussein. Lately Gephardt, hanging on for dear life in Iowa, was tossed into the mixer for insufficient enthusiasm for the Bush tax cuts -- listening to Joe Lieberman and John Kerry, you might think that they'd finally been persuaded by Grover Norquist that the only way to balance the federal budget is to bankrupt the government.

Indeed, perhaps the most useful byproduct of the Gang of Nine's debates has been to confirm that Lieberman is a politically tone-deaf cold warrior, as he turns in a dispiriting performance unmatched since Bob Dole insisted, "It's my turn!" back in 1996. Who needs William Safire or George Will when Lieberman is denouncing the Democratic front-runner as an appeaser and big-spender who will hamstring the military and restore funding to such frivolities as health care and education?

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The Voice for Peace

In this glum context, it was refreshing for Austin to be paid a spirited, if brief, visit by the Dennis Kucinich campaign, which for all its pragmatic shortcomings has the enormous virtue of maintaining a rational rhetorical standard on U.S. foreign policy. Kucinich can at least declare himself without apology to be a "peace candidate." It is a measure of how far to the imperial right public debate has tilted that Howard Dean, who objected more to the unilateralist nature of the U.S. war on Iraq than to the invasion and conquest itself, is being portrayed in the press as the terrifying second coming of George McGovern. Would that it were so.

Kucinich, and to a less prominent degree Carol Moseley Braun and Al Sharpton, serve as useful reminders to the party's institutional front-runners that to the vast majority of the world, and even a sizable plurality of the U.S. voting public, the war on Iraq is not just impractical, expensive, distracting, or counterproductive. Rather, this war is criminal and lunatic, part of an all too consistently militarist U.S. policy of domination, control, and (when necessary) conquest of designated enemies, or former allies, when they get too far out of line from the perspective of U.S. policy elites. Kucinich's uncompromising opposition to the war on moral, and not just political, grounds makes it more difficult for Dean or the others to ignore the fact that the current Democratic energy has been fueled most prominently by opposition to Bush's illegal, dishonest, and unjustifiable military adventurism. If these guys are serious about rebuilding the Democratic Party, it's about time they start listening to Democrats.

More importantly, as he said last week, Kucinich's campaign (like those of Nader and the Greens) continues to help "create the space" for a truly internationalist and anti-war foreign policy and a worker-focused economic policy. There will be plenty of time, next summer, for Bush and the Dem nominee to lob rhetorical missiles at each other. Right now, it is helpful to be reminded that at the ground level, the populace is much more independent-minded and less bellicose than its anointed leadership.

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Handicapping the Handicapped

Can any of these guys win? I am not so instinctively pessimistic as my colleague Mike Clark-Madison, who suggests elsewhere in this issue that we'd all be better off paying less attention to the political version of American Idol and more to the nitty-gritty of local races, where our quality of community life is most directly at risk. He's got a point. He knows the numbers a lot better than I do, and considering the lengths to which the Bushites went to win in 2000 -- when they did not yet have the presidency in their pocket -- I see little reason for confidence that we enter the new year with a president or a political elite committed to popular democracy and eager to respond to the voting public. Moreover, the intermittent sabre-rattling at Iran and Syria -- aggressiveness generally endorsed by the Democratic establishment -- coupled with the new political weapon of anti-terrorist hysteria, makes it hard to believe that any national politician not conscripted to arms and empire can make much headway in the media or the popular imagination, even as the social and democratic contract continues to unravel at home.

Ah, well. All weekend, those Kucinich folks -- who are to Dean supporters as Eugene McCarthy was to George McGovern -- kept repeating that the beginning of hope is the end of fear. It's a useful thought, and let's resolve to enter the new year, and another presidential cycle, determined to persuade ourselves that we're a better country than our candidates. Bush is certainly beatable -- but the next president, whoever he is, will only be as good (or bad) as we allow him to be.