Politics, Morality and the GOP

Deepak Tripathi

The gloom of Hurricane Gustav was promptly blown away by the arrival of Sarah Palin, the running mate of John McCain, at the Republican Convention in St. Paul. The partisan delegates seemed genuinely thrilled by her acceptance speech. But developments of the past week across the country remind me of an historic truth of politics. Almost fifty years ago, Harold Macmillan, then British prime minister, was asked what he thought was the greatest obstacle to political achievement. “Events, dear boy, events,” came the reply from Macmillan. His words seem to have a powerful resonance in the US presidential campaign today.

The historic nature of Palin’s nomination and her galvanizing effect on the Republican faithful cannot be dismissed. But new revelations about herself and her family almost every day are impossible to ignore either. Some of these are acknowledged. Others are contested. Complaints of exaggeration and distortion abound and threats of legal action fly. Republican advisors are irritated at the questions raised about Palin’s selection by McCain, her qualifications and her views. In the face of persistent questioning by Justine Webb, the BBC Washington correspondent, a senior McCain advisor, Carly Fiorina, seemed angry, calling Palin’s treatment by the media ‘sexist’. With a Democratic presidential candidate of mixed white-African lineage and a female candidate for the vice presidency on the Republican side, race and gender cannot be far from the debate.

It is the unexpected and unwanted events, which I referred to earlier, that represent ‘red lights’ for the Republican campaign. As soon as McCain had announced his surprise choice of Sarah Palin as his vice-presidential running mate, the troopergate controversy blew up. It involves the dismissal of the Public Safety Commissioner, Walter Monegan, of the state of Alaska by Governor Palin. Was Monegan sacked because he was no good in the job? Or because of his reluctance to fire the Governor’s ex-brother-in-law? On September 4, the Washington Post reported that it had seen an e-mail from Governor Palin, harshly criticizing Alaska state troopers for their failure to sack her former brother-in-law and ridiculing an investigation into her own conduct in the affair.

Then the announcement came that her teenage daughter was pregnant with her boyfriend. Palin is a strong advocate of sexual abstinence before marriage. So the episode was bound to pose a serious dilemma, as well as cause discomfort, for the Palin family. America is a country of fascinating contrasts. It is a nation where state and religion are supposed to remain separate. But religious and moral debate has acquired an increasingly important role in politics, most notably, but not exclusively, on the Republican side. The risks of this phenomenon are obvious. For those humans who fail to live by what they preach may be accused of inconsistency and hypocrisy.

It gets more embarrassing. According to the New York Times of September 3, Palin’s husband, Todd, is a former member of the Alaska Independence Party – a party which wants to hold a referendum to secede from the United States. And the newspaper quoted officials as saying that she had attended the party’s conventions in 1994 and 2006. As governor, she sent a video-taped message to the convention last year.

How Palin’s religious faith shaped her worldview was illustrated by an address she gave to a church gathering as recently as three months ago. She told the congregation that America sent troops to fight in the Iraq war on a “task that is from God.” Imagine the effect of these words on the people of Iraq, where hundreds of thousands of men, women and children have perished for no fault of their own and millions have been displaced internally or gone into exile.

The Republican Party’s counter-attack on the probing media has begun. But questions about Palin’s past are unlikely to go away. The more appearances Palin makes on the campaign trail, the more interest there is going to be in her. And the more questions both McCain and Palin are going to face. From tabloids like the National Enquirer to highbrow papers such as the Washington Post and the New York Times, a range of news outlets have deployed extra staff. Alaska has become a favorite haunt for many reporters.

The problem the Republicans face in this campaign is simple, yet considerable. There is so much interest in Governor Sarah Palin, because so little is known about her. It is a problem which is easy to understand, but difficult to tackle as ‘events’ unfold.

I have witnessed political storms caused by events in my time. In his address to the Republican National Convention, John McCain ran through his military record, which thousands of party faithful applauded and more admire across America. As the speech went on, I heard the words ‘back to basics’. They instantly reminded me of Britain in 1993. The government of Margaret Thatcher’s successor, John Major, was weak and tired. Major was struggling with the grim state of the economy and social unrest. At a time of need for a huge investment of new ideas and money, the governing Conservative Party launched, perhaps fatally, the ‘Back to Basics’ campaign. It was filled with high moral tone, at a time when the baggage of divisive, failing policies was heavy.

The campaign sparked intense public interest in the private lives of elected politicians in Britain. It was unfair to individuals. But the public interest was legitimate, precisely because it was an attempt to impose a set of rules on the vast majority of people that the imposers themselves did not respect. Exposé after exposé followed and powerful figures were forced to resign. The tide overwhelmed the Major government, ending in a resounding defeat in the 1997 general election – a humiliation from which the Conservative Party has only recently begun to recover.

There are episodes of history in America and elsewhere that mirror the fate of the Major government and shout out loud the lesson to be learned. When politicians bring prescriptive solutions to moral and ethical questions, they do so at their own peril. These questions are best left to the law and the courts.

The above commentary appeared in CounterPunch on 5 September 2008.

On the Race for the White House

Deepak Tripathi

[History News Network, Center for History and New Media, George Mason University, Virginia, USA, September 2, 2008]

The season of party conventions will soon be over and America is poised for two months of hard campaigning to elect the next president. There will be debates between Barack Obama and John McCain and between their running mates. The media blitz will get more fierce. Personal attacks will entertain and appall. For the first time in American history, there is serious contender of mixed race for the White House. It makes the issue of race an integral part of the political debate. Some Americans are going to continue to raise it openly. More could well make their choice, after a long period of reflection, one way or the other, as late as the moment of casting their vote.

In the past, I have seen the American democracy at work from close. As I follow the campaign in 2008 from across the Atlantic in Britain, the distance gives me the opportunity of detachment. I hope it allows me a panoramic view of the political tides that are to sweep across America before polling day on November 4. And it makes it possible to look at the democracy in America alongside the leading democracies in Europe and the place citizens of different races and creeds have in them. My interest in America is abiding – a country where I first arrived as a twenty-two-year-old to work as far back as 1974. My young grandchildren are Americans and live there.

Already, I have seen opposite currents in the campaign. On the one hand, a desperate desire for change after eight years of war, economic hemorrhaging and damage to America’s image under the Bush presidency. On the other, the tentative allegiance of sections of potential Democrat voters, despite powerful pledges of support for Barack Obama from Senator Hillary Clinton and the former President, Bill Clinton.

On the one hand, a show of unity between the two rival camps as the Democratic Convention moved towards conclusion. On the other, the uncertainty among some white Americans across the nation, in particular women supporters of Hillary Clinton, who have threatened to switch to John McCain, the Republican. Questions about race and faith, unfair in my view, are barely concealed. Obama’s advisers realize the need to go beyond his powerful rhetoric, to address middle class concerns and to win over undecided voters to give him the victory. How far does his acceptance speech, on the twin themes of rebuilding the economy and restoring America’s moral leadership abroad, go will be clearer as the campaign moves on.

The United States presidency has been a monopoly of Anglo-American politicians since the founding of the country more than two centuries ago. In a country of immigrants from all over the world, this, in itself, is a paradox. Now, the prospect of a break from history is near, but forces of resistance persist. Political fortunes can change rapidly. There is no better acknowledgement of it than by Harold Wilson, the British prime Minister in the 1960s and 1970s, who said that “a week in politics is a long time.” We have seen it in the current campaign in the month of August.

With the battle of the primaries over, and the prospect of an Obama presidency closer, we have seen a shift in the public opinion in August, with McCain running neck-and-neck, or leading. Not all potential voters are convinced that Obama offers something radically different. And there are those who doubt his ability to deliver, saying that promises of reform often become hostages to Congressional battles and resistance from corporate America. Ironically, some of the most radical ideas in America come from smaller parties and activists, like the Greens and the independents, not from the two main parties that have the monopoly of power in the country. Alternative visions are more comfortable in Germany, France and Britain than in America. The ‘tyranny of the majority’, which Alexis de Tocqueville and John Stuart Mill have written about, and which George W. Bush has exercised during his presidency, is more difficult to prevail on this side of the Atlantic.

The conflict between Georgia and Russia has created an environment suitable for jingoism. Mind not the NATO expansion around Russia under the Bush administration. Not the growing American and Israeli presence in Georgia since Mikheil Saakasvili came to power in 2004. Not even Saakasvili’s decision to bomb the breakaway region of South Ossetia, with a vast majority of Russian citizens, before the Russia military intervened. In a CNN interview, the Russian Prime Minister, Vladimir Putin, has directly accused the Bush administration of encouraging Georgia to attack South Ossetia, to help a presidential candidate in the coming election. Americans, said Putin, were present in the conflict zone, ‘doing as they were ordered’. Predictably, the White House and the State Department issued swift denials, calling the Russian accusations ‘ludicrous’ and ‘not rational’.

I am reminded at this point of something John McCain’s chief strategist, Charlie Black, said in a Fortune Magazine interview last June. With two-thirds of Americans saying the war in Iraq was not worth fighting, and growing worries about the economy, Black was asked whether another attack on U.S. soil would help McCain. His reply: “Certainly, it would be a big advantage to him.” Charlie Black later apologized for his comments.

After trailing in opinion polls for weeks, August has been a good month for McCain. Between now and November 4, the Bush administration and the Republican Party will try to keep the focus on national security. Russia is not the power the Soviet Union was. But there will be talk of the menace of Moscow. Declarations on the need for a strong America and a tough stance towards Russia will persist.

We will hear more claims of success in America’s war in Iraq, although hundreds of civilians still die there every month. Contrary to evidence in Afghanistan and Pakistan, there will be assertions about progress in the ‘war on terror’. The American military will continue its secret operation to send Guantanamo detainees to countries like Algeria, Tunisia, Saudi Arabia and Egypt. And claims will be made again and again that only John McCain is fit to be the president of the United States – a veteran of the Vietnam War, in which he endured torture and America lost.

It was the Vietnam War that brought the presidency of Lyndon Johnson to an abrupt end in 1968. Richard Nixon resigned in 1974 after the Watergate scandal. Nixon’s handpicked successor, President Gerald Ford, gave him a full, unconditional pardon, which contributed to Ford’s defeat to Jimmy Carter two years later. Had there been no American hostage crisis in the wake of the collapse of the pro-U.S. regime in Iran, and the failed attempt to rescue the hostages, Carter might not have been defeated by Ronald Reagan in the 1980 election. And it was the perceived failure of George Bush Senior to tackle the inner-city problems after the Los Angeles riots which turned the tide against him and gave victory to Bill Clinton in 1992.

We know where the tidal waves took us in the past. Do we know what they are about to do now?