Elections 2004
It's not been a good couple of months for any one with a conscience or who favors progressive ideas or has a vision for the future. Pragmatism has been victorious in the Australian election; fear and ignorance were the real winners on the first Tuesday after the first Monday in November, the Palestinian Authority looks like suffering a period of instability with the passing of its long time leader and a NSW judge has, with an effort worthy of Doctor Strabismus (whom God preserve) of Utrecht, proved once and for all that newts have more sobriety than judicial officers. On the other hand, I had a relatively tidy sum invested in Makybe Diva in the Cup and, so, turned up a winner on at least one occasion.
What the Australian election did not prove one way or t'other, despite the protestations of the usual triumphalist Tory columnists and commentators, was the attitude of the people to Gulf War II. And it is difficult to draw any real conclusions from the results in the US.
The Return of the Evil Little Bastard
Taking the election closer to home first. Judging by the ads, what Howard campaigned on was the fact that he was not a former Mayor of Liverpool and that his government would, unlike the ALP, keep interest rates low. I don't think I saw a single positive ad from the Tories throughout the entire campaign: it was all interest rate scare and anti-Latham invective. The result was rather predictable in the Lower House, less so in the Senate. Labor, as I predicted, lost seats in Tasmania and WA and won seats in SA, NSW and Queensland. The Victorian result was far worse than I predicted, with no gain of seats and many Liberal marginals becoming a lot less marginal. Labor lost because of appalling tactics: it never responded adequately to the Liberal scare campaign; its own advertising was very unfocussed. It tried to play up health and education as its key issues but bungled the launch of the schools' policy and Medicare Gold. At no time did it clearly differentiate itself from the government, try to establish its vision for the future of Australia or address the visceral issues such as refugees, reconciliation and the republic. Nor did it address the other big lie of the Liberal campaign: that the government had reduced Australia's foreign debt. The government proportion of the debt has been reduced only at the expense of private debt and the net foreign debt has skyrocketed under the Lib's benign care. Labor's own scare campaign - if you elect Howard, you'll end up with Costello - actually reinforced a Liberal positive: many electors in marginal Liberal seats who might have voted for the ALP because of Howard's mean spirit and mendacity were convinced to stay with the government in the hope that the little bugger would be gone ere long. Fat chance! Nor did the ALP address frequently enough the lies, misinformation and illogic that underlay the government's re-election case. And they largely kept Latham sedated. End result: the electors were not given any reason to vote for anything other than their own base motives: the hope of low interest rates, maintenance of the current employment rates (based themselves on a statistical lie which Labor has never adequately addressed), and we're all right, Jack. (Labor also erred strategically, first in the way it released policy - its absolutely correct policy on old growth forests was released far too late in the campaign and inadequately supported by Kelvin Thompson, the environment spokesmodel - and also in the way it allocated preferences in the Senate races in Victoria and Tasmania, almost electing Family First in Tassie and ensuring its election in Victoria. The Australian Democrats made similar strategic errors in preferencing the fundamentalist god-botherers despite the fact that the conservative religious fringe opposes everything they stand for. You might argue that the ALP and the Democrats collected their karmic comeuppance.)
In my view, John Howard has but two mandates: not to raise interest rates (something over which the government has only minimal control in a macro-economic sense) and not to be Mark Latham, boy Mayor. Nothing else got through the miasma of the campaign.
And don't blame me, I voted Green.
We're still with Stupid
In the US, the situation is a lot more murky. Bush won, largely with the same states as in 2000, losing New Hampshire and winning New Mexico. (In the prescient words of H L Mencken, the pre-war journalist I have quoted before: "As democracy is perfected, the office of president represents, more and more closely, the inner soul of the people. On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart's desire at last and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron.")
Kerry's major tactical error was to concentrate too much on the international events and not sufficiently on the domestic where the rising deficit, unequal tax changes, increased unemployment and general social dislocation should have given him the edge. Of course, he had to overcome the usual falsified Bush smear campaign as well. In 1988 it was Willy Horton; in 1992 the 'bimbo outbreaks'; in 2000 a series of allegations about Al Gore that were repeated by a compliant press without sufficient examination. This year it was the group, 'Swift Boat Veterans for Truth', who lied on behalf of, and at the behest of, the Bushies. Many of these Vietnam vets carried a grudge arising from Kerry's sincere opposition to the war expressed on his return in the early 1970s but that doesn't justify the lies they spread about his actions during the war and whether he deserved the medals he was awarded. Like Latham, Kerry was too slow to respond to the smears, relying on the media to investigate them, find the truth and publish it. That isn't the way to fight malicious untruths, as Dukakis and Gore had earlier discovered.
Even allowing for the smears, all things being equal, Kerry would in fact have won the election but for two reasons. The first was the interference in the process of Osama bin Laden and the other arises from the discontinuity between the exit polls and the tabulated results. The polls were trending in Kerry's favor until bin Laden 'spoke for him'. He's no dummy is bin Laden and he knew very well the effect that his tape, released five days before polling day, would have on the electorate. He and Bush are in a symbiotic relationship: each needs the other desperately. Bin Laden gives Bush a reason for existence, since he has achieved nothing otherwise during his time as President; and bin Laden needs Bush the Crusader, who has proved to be the most effective recruiting tool that al-Qaeda has going (with Ariel Sharon a close second). So, if by 'endorsing' Kerry, bin Laden was able to convince fewer than 10,000 suburbanites in each of Cincinnati, Columbus, Toledo, Dayton, Akron and Cleveland to change their decision and switch back to the Shrub, he achieved what I see as his real objective and there went the election. (Had Kerry carried Ohio he'd have won in the Electoral College. It's as simple as that.) It suggests that there may not be a complete presence of idiocy in the American body politic that Bush ran behind the Republican Party in just about every swing state: there was a conservative trend which Kerry almost bucked. If you believe the results as posted.
The second possible reason for Kerry's loss raises some hard questions. For the second election in a row there has been a disjunction between the exit polls and the published results. In 2000, in Florida, Gore was going to win the state if the tabulated results matched the exit polls. In 2004, in Ohio and nationally, Kerry appeared more popular in the exit polls than in the tabulated results. This could mean that the methodology employed by the exit pollers is flawed, or that people lie when they are asked for whom they voted as they emerge from the polls. But, by Occam's Razor, there is an easier explanation: the exit polls reflect the people's intentions and the tabulated results do not. In Florida in 2000 we know that there were thousands of votes excluded, largely in Democrat counties: chads insufficiently punched; butterfly ballots where the elderly were enticed into voting for more than one candidate, invalidating votes; thousands of putative votes by those not properly recorded on the electoral rolls excluded by polling officials. Who were, by the way, employed by the Florida Attorney-General who, in her spare time, was the Florida campaign manager for Bush-Cheney in 2000. By 2004 many of these problems had been corrected, except for the fact that there were still problems with the roll of registered voters in Florida and other states, meaning hundreds of thousands of tentative ballots that needed to be accepted for inclusion. And were not. But, worse, antique voting apparatus in Florida and Ohio (and elsewhere) had been replaced by new electronic voting mechanisms, outsourced to the private sector, and provided by, and programmed by, a supplier who happens to be a major contributor to Bush and to the Republicans. There is a certain transparency in seeing physical ballots counted, assessed for inclusion, and tabulated. It allows for the parties' scrutineers to see that the count is fair. In the case of the electronic vote, the results are tabulated within the system, based on the code supplied by a partisan, private company. I am not asserting that there was any funny business involved here, nor am I pushing the more extreme of the extant conspiracy theories about the election current on the Internet and coming from a variety of American sources, just noting that the difference between the exit polls and the published results raises some interesting questions.
Whether or not there has been any funny business in the privately supplied hardware and software, the exclusion of thousands of potentially legitimate votes on questionable grounds, and exclusions of names from electoral rolls, means that there are major doubts about the validity of the Presidential results - largely in states where the Republicans control the electoral officialdom. For the second consecutive election, we can all join in a rousing chorus of the Shrub's leifmotif: "Hail to the Thief!"
Incompetence
America is supposed to be exporting its version of democracy to the rest of the world. Yet there is a plethora of emerging national states, especially in eastern Europe, who haven't learned a goddamn thing about rorting elections properly. Case in point, Ukraine. We have the usual suspects parading in the streets, being supported by the usual Horst Wessels in the press, here, in the US and the UK. But what are they whingeing about. In the former Soviet state of Georgia, for example, where the Yanks have obviously invested more education dollars, their favorite was able to garner 96.24 per cent of the vote! The winner in the Ukraine had a mere 54 per cent. And still there are accusations of vote-rigging and hundreds have taken to the streets. Interesting comparison: when millions protest Gulf War 2 in the West, they are a noisy minority; when hundreds welcome American troops in Baghdad or protest what appears to be a reasonably well-run election in a former Eastern bloc state which the Opposition lost, they are the voice of the people or an expression of 'people power'. You remember the time when the only good trade unions were those run by Lech Walesa in Poland. Heaven forfend that Australian waterfront workers should make similar demands to Solidarity! Anyway, my solution to the Kiev imbroglio is to send Jim Baker to Kiev. He sorted out any confusion about vote-rigging in Florida in 2000 and he'd soon sort of out these wimps in the Ukraine.
Tory hypocrisy
Galloping hypocrisy seems to be one of the hallmarks of the conservative commentariat these days (hypocrisy canters through the more progressive commentators). And I have some cases in point. The conservatives call consistently for 'smaller government' and for the need for government to gets its big feet off of business and the aspirational citizen. That is, until there is an issue where the conservatives want the government to dip a bloody great oar in. And usually it involves shoehorning the government right into the bedroom. Thus we have in the US (and to an extent in Australia) the two big right-wing wedge issues: trying to forbid women from having abortions and legislating so that marriage is always defined so as to exclude same-sex unions. Here are the people, who constantly call for less morale-crushing political correctness and for the need for personal responsibility, trying to dictate to the body politic that their morality should be recognised in legislation. And always it seems to be based on their peculiar reading of the Bible, particularly the 'Old Testament'. There are texts which can be used to say that the Book frowns on homosexuality but equally it frowns on the eating of shellfish and has some quite definitive things to say about the way in masters should deal with slaves. Apparently we can safely ignore the latter while asserting the universal truth of the biblical 'injunction' against poofs. But if we are going to use Biblical authority as the basis for modern marriage laws, what can we glean from the 'Old Testament'.
There is justification for the standard nuclear family, Genesis 2:24, for example. But inter-faith marriages were theoretically forbidden. Children of inter-faith marriages were considered illegitimate. Marriages were generally arranged by family or friends; they did not result from a gradually evolving, loving relationship that developed during a period of courtship. A bride who had been presented as a virgin and who could not be proven to be one was stoned to death by the men of her village. (Deuteronomy 22:13-21).
However, there is also authority for law change to mandate other forms of marriage.
Polygyny was practiced. Polygynists included Lamech, Esau, Jacob, Gideon, David and Solomon. There appear to be no references to polyandrous marriages in the Bible.
Levirate marriage, which involved a woman who was widowed without having borne a son being required to leave her home, marry her brother-in-law, live with him, and engage in sexual relations, was not only encouraged but mandated. See Genesis 38:6-10, wherein God punished the seed-spilling Onan for his failure to impregnate his dead brother's widow.
A female slave belonging to a wife could be given to the latter's husband, with or without her consent, as Hagar was given to Abraham.
A man can keep numerous concubines in addition to his multiple wives.
According to Numbers 31: 1-18, and Deuteronomy 21: 11-14, female prisoners of war could be given to male soldiers from their conquering nation as wives, after the proper purification and mourning of course.
Deuteronomy 22:28-29 requires that a female virgin who is not engaged to be married and who has been raped must marry her attacker. A man could become married by simply sexually attacking a woman that appealed to him, and paying his father-in-law 50 shekels of silver.
A slave owner could assign one of his female slaves to one of his male slaves as a wife.
I look forward to a comprehensive marriage act based on biblical precedent from those using the Bible to justify their prejudice against homosexual unions.
Conservative commentators can be counted on to find multiculturalism an appalling concept and to see it as a force for divisiveness, rather than social cohesion. At the same time, they can be guaranteed to be all in favor of private schooling, as an alternate from the deadening social engineering, which they see as commonplace in public schools. And they don't see the disjunction here. An increasing number of private schools are products of particular religious sects and ethno-religious minorities, which use the schools to inculcate their peculiar teachings and to separate the children of their believers from the non-believers in the wider world. These schools, increasingly funded by federal government grants and able to survive largely because of them, are in fact engines for the spread and maintenance of multiculturalism in society. If there were only public schools, then there would tend to be more homogenisation of education, and a lesser opportunity for the maintenance of the practices, mores and folkways of the religious and cultural minorities fostered by the growth of private education.
Finally, the Catholic conservatives cannot make up their mind who the real enemy is. Cardinal Ratzinger of the Vatican is a traditionalist: he sees 'secularism' as the great danger to the Church. But Cardinal Pell, our own home-grown proto-Torquemada, would have us believe that Islam is the new Communism. What a gross lack of insight, this insight reveals. The threat of communism, last century, largely arose from its secularist basis which rejected all religions. Islam's threat is that it is a more fundamentalist religious approach than Catholicism, thereby outflanking it on the Right. A slightly deeper analysis would have revealed that, at the time when secular communism was attracting some in the west, those with a more metaphysical bent were being drawn increasingly to eastern religions, particularly Buddhism. Those sort of attractions still exist and I would suggest to Ratzinger and Pell that rather than demonising 'secularism' or Islam, they should be seeking an explanation as to why Catholicism is no longer able to fill the spiritual needs of its congregation. And that, perhaps, it is a religion which is dominated by old men who have opted out of any sensible human relationship and who are thus not the ideal people to map the optimum methods for fostering love, life and family for those seek such relationships. At least they are not for the moment fomenting against that great Satan of the fundamentalist American southern states: 'secular humanism'. This is, I guess, that branch of the non-religious philosophy of humanism which is, er, non-religious.
First written: December 2004
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