YOU DON'T MATTER
POLITICAL PASSIONS FLAREMonroe County, KS. -- The campaign culminated in a bloody tragedy at Clarendon Saturday afternoon. The candidates were to speak and a great crowd had gathered. The debate became heated and one of the partisans, Wm. Walls of Holly Grove, attempted to strike one Dillard. But Dillard pulled his gun and shot Walls, who fell to his knees, pulled his revolver and shot Dillard twice, after which Walls fell back dead.
The mob rushed in on Dillard, but his friends surrounded him and, with pistols and knives, declared their intention to defend him. Sheriff Robinson attempted to arrest Dillard, but was shot in the thigh. The mob then closed in on Dillard and beat him terribly. A stray bullet killed a spectator. Dillard was finally spirited away, and the mob is after him. -News dispatch, c. 1890s
Now that's politics. Imagine getting worked up enough to have a fist fight, much less a shoot-out, over any of the platitudes and pabulum being put out by Gorebushbradleymccainforbesetal2000. I mean, do your neck hairs bristle when Shrub Bush scorches the hustings with such incendiary rhetoric as "I believe all public policy should encourage strong families"? Does your blood rise and your fists ball when Al Gore issues his clarion call for an "All National Traffic Hotline"?
Politics should matter. I know that's a radical thought, perhaps hopelessly idealistic in this age of carefully calculated political centrism, when the money backers demand candidates who are inoffensive, especially inoffensive to money interests), and when the army of consultants that directs every campaign insists that the way to win is not to lose. So both parties are scuttling cautiously along the pollster-tested center line like a couple of sand crabs, going sideways for fear of being perceived as either moving forward or backward.
Of course the Republican presidential nominee won't thump the tub this fall about the class war being waged against the middle class and poor folks by America's moneyed establishment - but neither will the Democratic nominee. Of course the Republican won't storm Wall Street's barricades of privilege to assail the greed of corporate downsizing and outsourcing of American jobs-and neither will the Democrat. Of course the Republican won't stand on the steps of the Capitol to decry the thievery of America's democracy by Gucci-wearing, PAC-peddling, Binaca-breathed corporate lobbyists-nor will the Democrat.
What a difference a generation makes. I can imagine teenagers today, as they come of voting age, gawking in disbelief as their parents tell them that there actually was a time when a Democratic presidential nominee was a species discernibly different from the Republican, when the Democrat was not skittish about kicking corporate ass, and when the Democratic Party didn't need a consulting firm to figure out who it was for ... and who it was against. This is a party with a heroic history of siding unequivocally with the common people against the bastards, a party that once even voted by a four-to-one margin at its national convention to disown any political candidate within its own ranks "who is the representative of or under obligation to J. Pierpont Morgan ... or any other member of the privilege-hunting and favor-seeking class."
Today, the Democratic Party itself, as well as its top candidates, boast of being under obligation to Morgan, or, more specifically, to J. P. Morgan Inc. and Morgan Stanley, the two Wall Street firms spawned by old J. Pierpont. Democrats go shamelessly and often into these houses of greed, obsequiously seeking campaign funds in a straight-up exchange for their populist principles and constituency. So far, AI Gore has bagged $22,000 just from the two Morgan firms, Bill Bradley has been blessed with $111,000, and the Democratic Party is obligated to the tune of $104,000.
This is an appalling perversion of everything that is important about the Democratic Party. If William Jennings Bryan were alive to see this, his eyeballs would explode and his hair would burst into flame! He would note, correctly so, that the party's only reason for existence is to serve those who want to challenge the haughty rule of Morgan Inc. and the other members of the privilege-hunting, favor-seeking class. It's fine for the J. P. Morgans to have one party, but if the Democrats, too, are inside the houses of Wall Street, where does this leave the vast majority of us who are outsiders?
Since Labor Day of 1996, it's been my good luck to be able to spend two hours every weekday talking with the American people on my call-in radio show, Hightower's Chat & Chew. With cohost Susan DeMarco, piano player Floyd Domino, and our occasional guests at the Round Table inside Threadgill's World Headquarters (the legendary Austin restaurant from which we sling our radio signal and Our B.S. coast to coast), I've had a steady stream of feedback from folks about what's going on where they live, far away from Wall Street.
I know, talk-radio listeners are said to be a bunch of know-nothing right-wingers spewing thirty-two flavors of pure dittohead venom, but that's not been our experience at all. I hasten to add that we're mostly on commercial AM stations, so our listeners cannot be accused of being a special crowd of effete liberals having a mocha-skinny-raspberry latte with their brioche while waiting for NPR's stock market report. Sure we get the odd spewer every now and then (as well as the odd NPR latte-sipper), but we're impressed day in and day out by how smart and informed the rank and file American people are ... and how good-spirited and funny they are.
These regular, workaday Americans are not the slightest bit moved by this year's mainstream candidates for president or Congress. What they want is a gutsy, even brawling politics with unscripted butt-kicking candidates who'll stand up for the majority in our country who are getting stomped on by Wall Street and pissed on by Washington. People want a politics with meaning and passion, that's worth getting embroiled in a fistfight. They want a politics that rallies them, in the stirring words of FDR in 1932, to join in a "crusade to return America to its own people."
That would be a politics that would bring hordes of people to the polls. But in the politics of 2000, people don't matter.
Steve Sovern found that out a few years ago when he ran for Congress from Cedar Rapids, Iowa. A Democrat, he was a promising candidate with a terrific group of volunteers and an enthusiastic base of support. The party brought him to Washington for a two-day candidate's workshop put on by the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee. Steve says he was excited to be among some seventy other grade-A Democratic candidates attending this how-to-win workshop: "I looked forward to returning to Cedar Rapids tilled with ideas, ideals, issues, and inspiration." He came to the meeting all bright-eyed and bushy-tailed with his notepad and tape recorder, ready to absorb all the wisdom the party could offer.
"Understand how the game is played," offered a big-time media consultant as the workshop opened. "Game?" thought Steve, as it quietly dawned on him that this might not be about ideals and issues. "Money drives this town," intoned a DCCC staffer, followed by another consultant who informed the budding members of Congress: "You have to sell yourself to Washington first," by which he meant the lobbyists who control the PAC funds. Rep. Peter Hoagland, then a lawmaker from Nebraska, came in to assure the group that "raising Campaign money from Washington PACs is much easier than from individuals because it's a business relationship." Steve's eyes squinted as he thought, "Business relationship?" The DCCC staffer clarified the point, in case any of the seventy innocents didn't get it: "These people are paid to give you money. You have to do certain things, but they want to give you money."
What if you don't want to take their filthy lucre, which Steve did not? Congressman Hoagland: "Some of you may be under pressure to repudiate PACs. I strongly suggest you not take the hook. Restrain yourself, don't let zeal for reform influence you." Hmmm, thought Steve: "Let lobbyists' money influence you, but not zeal for reform?"
To put theory into practice, day two of the workshop began with a "mating dance" brunch. The DCCC invited a flock of PAC directors to eat croissants and look over the seventy congressional prospects, Who in turn were expected to preen, strut, and do Whatever it takes to mate monetarily with the PACs. Steve reports that the candidates Wore blue name tags, while the PACs sported red ones. Rep. Beryl Anthony of Arkansas led the dance, informing the candidates that the assembled PAC directors were their friends, that PACs represent "little people." Steve says, "I saw the Phillips Petroleum PAC representative smile with approval. I Wondered if he Was representative of the 'little people' to Whom Anthony referred." The congressman then urged the PAC reps to visit with each of the candidates while they were in town, because he was sure the money interests would find matches among the law- makers-to-be that will "make your board of directors proud of you."
Left out of the equation, said Steve, 'were the people I sought to represent." Instead, all the instruction was on raising money and hiring Washington consultants to run their congressional campaigns. "You can't hire local people-forget it!" bellowed a PAC director. Congressman Hoagland underscored the point: "[You] must hire world-class people and not local people. That's why you have to raise a lot of money."
Don't even mess with volunteers, the eager candidates were told by a PAC director: "They can't do polling, radio, direct mail, or TV." Steve was stunned: "At the moment he spoke, my campaign had scores of volunteers who still believed in a government 'of the people: phoning neighbors to talk about the campaign and issues that concerned them. Other volunteers were stuffing and stamping envelopes for a direct-mail response to those concerns."
At this point, he had absorbed all the cynical, manipulative, money-driven expertise he could stand, so he rose to his feet and told them so, pointing out that what they were telling the candidates is exactly what people hate about politics, that this approach is a dangerous turnoff to turnout, and that it ought to be Democrats who lead the crusade to end the kind of politics they were being coached at this workshop to use. Steve says, "There was an uncomfortable silence after my comments." Then a PAC director said: "Well, I guess we don't have to worry about contributing to 'that campaign." There was a spattering of nervous laughter, then the workshop proceeded as though nothing had happened.
Sure enough, the PACs did not contribute. Steve says he was even cut from the DCCC mailing list after the workshop, no longer sent any issue papers or legislative updates. Instead, the Washington money, expertise, and even DCCC staff went to another Democrat who had already lost twice in this congressional district but was willing to "play the game." With his Washington lobbyists' PAC money, the two-time loser was able to overwhelm Steve in the primary, then proceeded to lose for a third time to the Republican in the fall.
FIRST, KILL ALL THE CONSULTANTSHere they come, tromp-tromp-tromping over the horizon, the mercenary army of professional political consultants, now more than thirty-five thousand strong! They are coldly efficient at what they do, and they control practically every campaign in America, from city council to president.
Of course, political consultants have been around since politicians first popped up. The earliest recorded evidence of these creatures was Quintus Cicero's tract, the Handbook of Electioneering, which he wrote to guide the 63 B.C. campaign of his famous orating brother Marcus Tullius Cicero, who was seeking a consulship to Rome at the time. (However, some date the craft much further back, crediting the snake that advised Eve with being the first consultant-which shows what trouble they can cause.) Only recently, though, have these political pros become so pervasive and dominant. Whereas electioneering even twenty-five years ago was handled by the candidate, a campaign manager, a press secretary, maybe two or three other paid staffers, and a host of committed volunteers, today there are paid specialists to run every aspect of the campaign:
Strategic planner
Campaign director
Staff manager
High-dollar fund-raiser
Low-dollar fund-raiser
Event planner
Scheduling coordinator
Poll-question writer
Poll taker
Focus-group coordinator
Voter targeting director
Weasel coordinator (just kidding)
Field-staff director
Dress and color adviser (not kidding)
Debate simulator/coach
Telemarketer
Delegate counter
Speechwriter
Radio ad producer
TV ad producer
Radio/TV time buyer
Direct-mail writer
Direct-mall list buyer
Media relations director
Travel aide
Opposition-research director
Issue-development director
GOTV-director
More than fifty separate job categories exist for political , professionals - including consultants who specialize in finding and selecting candidates to run for particular offices. Yes, it has come to this low ebb: Consultants choose the candidates! It will not surprise you, I'm sure, to learn that their chief criterion in choosing a "good candidate" is that the person have an aptitude for fund-raising - gotta keep the army fed. And it's a hungry army-one survey found that of the $542,000,000 spent by all congressional candidates in a recent general election, $248,000,000 of it went to these hired guns. There is so much paid staff that just keeping in touch is a problem-one of the odder artifacts unearthed when sifting through the statistical rubble of Bob Dole's 1996 presidential organization was this: He spent $14,000 on beepers.
The impact of this mercenary invasion of American democracy has been devastating, reducing elections to computerized, cynical exercises in which the people are irrelevant, and such niceties as issues, ethics, and the future of the nation are beside the point.
Candidates don't need their own core beliefs, or goals for America, when their handlers can provide market-tested beliefs and goals for them based on the results of a very nineties electioneering mechanism called the focus group. Borrowed from Madison Avenue, this process involves bringing a dozen or so voters into a room for a few hours of professionally structured conversation around such profound political questions as: "If George W. Bush were an animal, what would he be?" Miles Benson of Newhouse News Service sat through some focus groups last year and reports that participants "are hooked to computers and handed a device with a dial to twist to register the intensity of their reactions, positive or negative. These responses are displayed instantly as trend lines on a graph, with a computer isolating the effects of various words and ideas and showing precise differences in the reactions of Democrats, Republicans, and independents." Benson writes that consultants watch the group while hiding behind see-through mirrors, recording facial expressions and body language. Out of this voyeuristic exercise come the candidates' campaign themes ("compassionate conservative"), positions on issues, phrases for attacking opponents, and other manipulative language designed to sell product A over product B. This is why so many candidates come off sounding like a breath of hot air.
The official creed of consultants is: Whatever It Takes! The point is to win. Period. Consultants live and die on their won/lost record, so distortions, innuendoes, outright lies, dirty tricks, spying, negative ads, gay-baiting, hate mailings, and so forth are just part of the accepted weaponry of modern campaigns. As a consultant once told me, "We always stand on principle. And stand on it and stand on it, so it won't ever rise up and get in our way."
The most common weapon in the consultant's arsenal is the attack ad, which we've all seen and learned to loathe. Humorist Dave Barry explained these in a column last year: "In America, the only way you can get elected to high office is to hire expensive consultants who conduct expensive polls to find out what the voters think, and then, having found out that the voters think that all politicians are slime, make expensive TV commercials wherein you show a hideously unflattering photograph of your Opponent and have a snarling announcer say something like: 'Harvey Hackenslit would have you believe that he has never eaten live human babies. Who's he trying to fool?' "
A preacher in the Methodist church I attended as a boy used to teach us kids that "you don't make your house any prettier by burning down your neighbor's." Apparently, consultants attended a different church, for negative campaigning- going after their opponents with lies, hammers, tongs, blowtorches, chain saws, and nuclear explosives, all designed to pervert positions and burn down reputations-is considered a legitimate part of the game.
I've had my own political house singed. Running for reelection as state ag commish in 1990, a last-minute negative TV ad smeared me ... and hurt me. It came from my GOP challenger, whose campaign was being coordinated by Karl Rove, a fellow who now is consultant-in-chief on the George W. Bush presidential bandwagon. The ad showed a flag burner torching Old Glory and tossing it on the ground to burn. The camera panned in on the flag, then, arising out of the flames came my picture, along with the somber voice of a narrator declaring that Jim Hightower supports flag burners. I did not, but the impact on voters, though, was visceral and damaging-" My God," I could hear the viewers muttering to themselves, "I kind of liked ol' Hightower, but I had no idea he was a flag burner."
A 1998 poll of two hundred political consultants found nearly unanimous agreement that they found nothing wrong with such negative campaigning. Syndicated political columnist David Broder reports on an article written by two consultants with a firm called Campaign Performance Group: "Fear, anger, envy, indignation, and shame are powerful emotions in the political arena .... Go the distance.... Negative campaigning is rarely pretty. Sometimes it doesn't feel very good either. But once you've made the decision to inform the voters of your opponent's shortcomings, stick to your guns.... Remember, you're playing to win."
Then there are dirty tricks, which range from sophomoric pranks (like the "black fax," which involves faxing black paper to an opponent's fax machine in the wee hours when no one's around, thereby burning out their ink cartridge and filling their fax room with a pile of black paper) to the dangerous. Years ago, my friend Jose Angel Gutierrez led a third-party insurgency to defeat the old Anglo power structure in Zavala County, Texas. Angel himself became county judge-a mighty powerful position in Texas, controlling road money, patronage, and a lot more. At reelection time, though, he kept coming across rattlesnakes in the most unusual places-like his desk drawer, his mailbox, and his wastebasket.
Once known as backroom hatchet men, today's consultants are as out-front and as quoted as the candidates, sometimes more so, taking credit for everything from the campaign's strategy to the candidate's speeches. They've become media stars-which tells us all we need to know about the vacuousness both of politics and of our country's celebrity system. Case in point: Dick Morris, who has no credibility and nothing to say, yet says it over and over again on national television yakety-yak shows. He's the party-hopping consultant who has no ethical problem with having been a gunslinger for Bill Clinton, then for Trent Lott, then back to Clinton, whom he coached on how to become more Republican than Bob Dole in his '96 reelection bid. The whorish Morris fell into complete personal and professional disgrace that year after his ongoing affair with a Washington prostitute of the sexual variety was exposed. She told the media that he revealed White House secrets. to her while sucking her toes in a $400-a-night hotel. That's kinky on several levels. Yet, like a bad tamale, this gasbag keeps coming back-he got a book contract, writes a newspaper column, was on TV more often than Lucianne Goldberg (herself a former GOP dirty-tricks consultant) during the Monica Lewinsky unpleasantness, and still today is a sought-after television commentator, actually asked to give the public his insights into the ethics of other political players.
This would be inexplicable, except that it's not unusual. The media has bought wholly into the consultantization of our politics, reporting on the game rather than the substance, so it routinely interviews consultants in lieu of candidates, it evaluates the relative "seriousness" of candidates based on which set of consultants they hire, it relies on consultants as primary background sources for its election coverage, and it reports straight-faced the polls and political spin of consultants.
There's a term that applies to the media's tedious and essentially empty coverage of America's elections: teptology. It means boringly detailed discourses on trivial subjects. That's what we get when the media bothers to cover elections at all, which increasingly they don't. Rocky Mountain Media Watch, a fine watchdog group that monitors the decline in electoral coverage, analyzed 128 newscasts by local television in twenty-five states just before the '98 elections. Viewers were four times more likely to see a paid political ad than a news story about the campaigns. A third of the newscasts carried not a single political story. The three major networks were just as sorry, from Labor Day to Election Day in '98 they carried only 72 campaign stories (down from 268 four years earlier). In that same period, the nets carried 426 Monica Lewinsky stories.
This is the same media that runs editorials on Election Day chastising candidates for not talking more about issues and scolding people for not paying more attention and not turning out to vote.
The system is strictly an insider game in which the media and consultants not only know each other, they are each other-media types routinely cross the street to become consultants or campaign staffers, while consultants and staffers just as routinely cross the other way to become the media. Bob Beckel, for example, was a hired gun brought in to direct Walter Mondale's 1984 run for president against Ronald Reagan, a lamentable effort that resulted in Mondale winning only his home state of Minnesota. Shortly afterward, however, Beckel had his own political TV show! My friend and longtime political reporter Ken Bode said to Beckel, "Geez, Bob, imagine if you'd won two states-they would've given you your own network." Our laughter has now turned into reality, not for Beckel, but for Roger Ailes, the former GOP and Reagan operative-for-hire who has been ensconced by Rupert Murdoch to run the news division of Fox Television Network.
Those in this political class have turned politics into mechanics, turning off voters who would be a lot more interested if an election was about policies that might improve their lives. But, hey, shout the pros to the American majority: This is not about you! We don't even want you voting, because you're not in our databases, and when you vote the results are unpredictable and ... well, messy.
It's the dirty little secret of today's money-and-consultant-based politics that a low voter turnout is desirable. This is because consultants for both parties maintain massive databases of voting records for every U.S. household. They know who in the household has voted, how often they've voted, how they're inclined to vote, and what their hot-button issues are. Since most people have been turned off by politics and government, and therefore don't often vote, the focus of campaigns is on the few who most regularly go to the polls-including union members, pro-choice women, and environmentalists for Democrats; antitaxers, antiabortion stalwarts, NRA members, and the extreme religious right for Republicans.
These "voters who really matter," in the parlance of the political pros, are the domain of Get-Out-the-Vote consultants. They pore over miles of computer printouts, targeting their core constituencies as well as the persuadables and the swing voters. The Wall Street journal reports that they are assisted in this narrowing of the political focus by specially designed computer programs with names like "Turnout Advantage," "Smart Select," and "Vote Predictor." As a Democratic GOTV specialist told the journal, "You're trying to sort out the grass from the weeds, collect the most data and figure out how many voters you can get out of these little clusters."
To help motivate their targeted "base," both parties play legislative games in Washington, forcing votes on what are called "hand-grenade issues" that won't pass but will provide electoral ammunition. Republicans, for example, keep return ing to partial-birth abortion bans, prayer in the schools, abolishment of the income tax, a constitutional amendment against flag burning, and piffles like majority leader Trent Lott's "Ten Commandments Defense Act" (don't ask).
With their key voters identified, the consultants then apply the mechanics of GOTV, including phone banks, targeted mailings, phone banks, door drops, phone banks, absentee-voting and early-voting drives, phone banks, rides-to-the-polls, phone banks, voting-day checkoff lists, and more phone banks. The calls can be annoying. A Republican in Palos Verdes, California, fed up with all the GOTV calls to her in the '98 election, proposed in a letter to the Los Angeles Times that political operatives be banned from telephoning without prior written consent from the voter: "I got five calls a day for a week, then one evening a call every three minutes for an hour and a half-and my number is unlisted!" At least she was wanted - unlike the majority.
In case you're under any delusion that this will all go away; I'm sorry to report that the consulting industry is so entrenched that it has its own magazine (Campaigns & Elections), its own Grammy-style awards (the "Pollie"), and-horrors - its own PR/lobbying organization, called the American Association of Political Consultants. Based on Capitol Hill (where else?), AAPC's mission statement lists such goals as "enhancing the political process and improving public confidence in the American political system," and "reaching out to involve and educate young people in the art of political consultation and in the benefits it brings to the practice of democracy."
Please AAPC, back off. Leave our young people alone. Do not molest them any further with your obscene talk about any benefits that this bloodsucking coven of consultants brings to our democracy.
If AAPC is not a clear sign to you that the ideal of citizen government is headed straight to hell in a consultant's rocket- powered alligator briefcase, be forewarned that there's something called the Graduate School of Political Management at George Washington University. "Professional campaigning is a multi-billion dollar business, which is becoming increasingly sophisticated and technology driven," enthuses the GSPM Web site, apparently oblivious to the fact most Americans find this a deplorable development that needs to be fought, not taught. Nonetheless, they are churning out a whole new generation of political professionals (pol-pros) bearing master's degrees that proclaim them to be proficient at subverting democracy. Among the socially useful jobs that the GSPM girds its students to perform are campaign manager, fundraiser, lobbyist, and corporate public affairs officer. Classes include "campaign advertising and promotion," "issues management," "managing government relations," "lobbying the budget process," and "executive fund-raising."
Gosh, think how great this country might have been if instead of Jefferson, Paine, Washington, Madison, and the other citizens who came up with all that "We the People" stuff-there had been some GSPMA degree holders to do the job for us.
THE NONEOFTHEABOVESIn the nineteenth century, British economist Walter Bagehot said: "The cure for admiring the House of Lords is to go and look at it."
The American majority has taken a long, hard look at the Democrat-Republican, two-party house of cards-and they are cured. You'd never know this, though, by listening to or reading the establishment media's farcical coverage of election results. "America Moves to the Right," screamed a headline the day after Newt Gingrich's Republicans Won control of Congress in 1994; "New Conservative Tide," announced another; "Voters Endorse Newt's Contract," asserted still another. But look out! Only four years later, voters were stampeding again: "America Seeks Middle," "A Move to Moderation," "Voters Choose Centrism" blared headlines the day after the 1998 congressional elections.
Boy, the people must be exhausted after having dashed so far to the right, then turned right around and bolted en masse back to the center. One could get tennis-neck watching the electorate dart back and forth-except that about 94 percent of folks didn't dart anywhere.
Let's do the math (it's only one paragraph, so you can do it, I know you can; come on, let's try). First, the Republicans. In 1994, about 22 percent of eligible voters went Republican in Newt's "big sweep"; in 1998, about 18 percent of voters went Republican; so, only 4 percent of eligible voters darted from the GOP. Did they dart to the Democrats? No: In 1994, about 19 percent of eligible voters went Democratic; in 1998, about 17 percent of voters went Democratic; so, even though the media pitched the '98 election as a "Democratic comeback" against Newt, they actually lost 2 percent of eligible voters from their column. In addition, third-party candidates got about 1 percent of the vote in both years: Therefore, the media-induced image of electoral masses surging here and there comes down to only 6 percent of eligible voters going anywhere.
Now, here's THE BIG STORY missing from the media's election coverage: The fastest-growing party in America is not the Republicans or the Democrats but the NOTA Party-the Noneoftheabove Party. All those numbers in the paragraph above come down to the startling fact that 58 percent of voters in 1994 could not stomach getting in the polling booth with either party, while in 1998, the Noneoftheabovers had grown to 64 percent. Need a chart to visualize all these numbers? Here:
PERCENTAGE OF ELIGIBLE VOTERS WHO VOTED, BY PARTY
Year / Republican Party / Democratic Party / Third Parties / NOTA Party (i.e., did not vote)
1994 / 22% / 19% / 1% / 58%
1998 / 18% / 17% / 1% / 64%
SHIFT / -4% / -2% / same / +6%
Source: Curtis Gans, Committee for the Study of the American Electorate.
In 1964, I got some 760 votes in a race for student body president at the University of North Texas. That was about 10 percent of the students in the school, and I thought, sheesh, how embarrassing. And I was the winner! But these days we're electing national lawmakers and governors on margins almost as low as my collegiate election. Consider "Shrub's Story." The upwardly mobile Texas governor was reelected in '98 by what was hailed nationwide as a "breathtaking landslide," with Texas voters "overwhelmingly" endorsing his political management of the state. Instantly, he was propelled into the front ranks of presidential aspirants, based on this demonstration that he is "a formidable vote-getter."
Unmentioned was the fact that the turnout in his election was a dismal 26 percent-lowest in the nation. He ran against a Democratic Party that had essentially abandoned its own gubernatorial nominee. Roughly 16 percent of eligible voters is all that George W. Bush could muster to stand with him. It's not so much that he increased the usual vote that Republican candidates for governor can count on, but that the Democrats had collapsed, unable to draw more than about 8 percent of the eligible to vote for them.
Bush was not alone among politicos in the last election who claimed to be exhilarated but were really just breathing their own exhaust fumes. "Democrats Exult in Broad Victory," declared the Los Angeles Times after the party cut into the GOP majority in Congress. Yet, the Republicans still con trolled the House and Senate, and the Democrats actually had a lower percentage of voters going with them in '98 than in '94. Worse, the party-of-the-people continued to sag with its natural constituency of working-class folks-it only led Republicans among voters with a high school degree by two percentage points, and it lost among voters with some college but not a four-year degree. This is not happy news for Dems at all, since Americans with less than a four-year degree comprise 75 percent of all adults. Indeed, the party's only significant gain was among voters with incomes of more than $75,000 a year-a pool that includes less than 5 percent of the people. How many brains does it take to figure out you dive in the deep end rather than the shallow?
The media-clueless to the bone-hailed the '98 national - vote as the public's demand for don't-rock-the-boat centrism. Again, the LA Times: "The nation's voters are looking for moderation...." Really? Then what was that Jesse "the Body" Ventura thing in Minnesota all about? Whatever you think of Ventura since his '98 election, it's clear that the people who put this pink-boa-wearing, shaved-head, kick-ass professional wrestler and Reform Party upstart in the Guv's chair had something other than moderation in mind. But the political pros and media pundits gawked at him like he was a billy goat in a tutu: "This is the most bizarre result of the evening," gasped the election analyst at CNN.
Compared to what? Strom Thurmond and Jesse Helms still sitting in the U.S. Senate, despite being dead for years? A cockroach like Bob Barr and a purse-lipped, pucker-assed prude like Bill McCallom getting reelected to the Congress? Indeed, how about the fact that special-interest money gives incumbents such an advantage that house members are four times more likely to die in office than to be defeated. Isn't that bizarre?
Since Jesse wasn't a product of the money/consultant system, however, the media simply couldn't fathom his rise to high office. "Ventura's plain talk and populist ideas brought a near-stampede to the polls, many of whom told exit pollsters they voted only because 'Jesse' was in the race," marveled a Los Angeles Times election analyst, adding in befuddlement, "How exactly Ventura managed this is still being dissected." Managed? Dissected? Hello, pundit, please call home after your next orbit around Mars. The point is that Ventura didn't manage it-it's who he is, and dissecting that is like dissecting humor. More media: "Setting himself as outside the mainstream, he nonetheless came across as an 'Everyman' and had broad appeal across class and party lines." Good grief, get a grip. "Everyman" is outside the mainstream, at least as it's defined by those who draw the class and party lines. One more: "He effectively presented himself as a contrast to politics as usual." He didn't "present himself" as a contrast- he was a contrast!
Because he was unmanaged and outside the mainstream, not only did he win, but Minnesota's turnout was the highest in the nation at 60 percent. Ventura was especially strong with young people, blue-collar and Democratic voters, and mad-as-hellers who had not voted in years.
Jesse's election was the most publicized voter rebellion of '98, but hardly the only one. If you want a contrast to politicians-as- usual, you couldn't do better than Fred, a seventy-nine-year- old retired dairy farmer in Vermont. Fred Tuttle decided to run for the Republican nomination to the U.S. Senate against one Jack McMullen. The Vermonters who voted for Fred were definitely making a statement against today's politics of cynicism, which McMullen represented perfectly.
McMullen is a multimillionaire Boston consultant who decided he would buy himself a Senate seat, so he registered his Vermont vacation home as his new permanent residence in 1997, garnered the support of the state's GOP establishment, and set out to defeat incumbent senator Pat Leahy. Of course, to get to Leahy, he first had to hop the hurdle of the September '98 Republican primary, but Jack was spending $300,000 of his Own money on the primary, airing a blitzkrieg of television and radio ads and running an all-out modern campaign designed by the best pros - so he was confident. Besides, his only opponent was some old coot in overalls.
Tuttle, who wears a cap that says "Fred" on it, had already had fifteen seconds of fame, having been the main character in an independent film called Man with a Plan (still available on video), written and directed by his neighbor, John O'Brien. In the film, Fred's character gets tired of being a broke dairy farmer and decides to run for Congress, because the job pays well. His motto is "I've spent my whole life in the barn, now I want to be in the House," and he has a bumper sticker on his manure spreader that proclaims: "Spread Fred."
Meanwhile, back in real life, Fred and his filmmaker neighbor were upset that a Massachusetts millionaire was prancing into their state with an overdose of cash and arrogance. To twit this twit land to gin up a bit of publicity about their movie). they decide to enter Fred in the primary against McMullen. To make a wonderful story short, Fred caught on and "Spread Fred" bumper stickers became a cry of Vermont rebellion against today's whole sick system of politics. Tuttle spent only $216 on his campaign-$16 for the filing fee, and $200 to rent Porta Potties. The portable toilets were an unexpected, out-of-pocket expense necessitated when a crowd of two hundred people showed up for Fred's "Nickel-a-Plate" fund-raising dinner at his farm. Come election day, Fred drubbed McMullen, 55 percent to 45 percent.
He's not in the Senate, because ... well, basically he endorsed Leahy, saying the senator was a good man doing a good job. Besides, Fred said, "I can't go to Washington, D.C. Too many people down there."
The cognoscenti don't like to talk about it, but centrism, moderation, middle-of-the-road and status quo generally get a swift kick in the butt whenever people get a sense that their votes can matter, when an ax handle is put in their hands to smash the machine. Jesse and Fred were part of this recurring political phenomenon in 1998, but there were plenty of other ax handles available, too, thanks to ballot initiatives.
• Voters in Arizona and Massachusetts gave a resounding YES! to public financing of their state elections, crimping the power of corporations to buy government policies. (Arizona's initiative even included a tax on lobbyists to help pay for the public election fund.
• By a stunning 66 percent margin, the electorate in Washington State said YES! to a "living wage" initiative that effectively sets the wage floor there at $6.50 an hour, even indexing it to inflation.
• In Colorado, an initiative to regulate the massive (and massively polluting) corporate hog factories that are stinking up the place pulled a YES! from 64 percent of the voters; South Dakota went even further to stop the spread of these corporate stinkers, with 59 percent of the' voters there saying YES! to a constitutional amendment that flat-out bans them from the state.
• In open defiance of the loopy national drug czar and of demagoguing politicians who are denying the medical use of marijuana even to terminally ill patients, voters in Alaska, Arizona, Nevada, Oregon, Washington State, and the District of Columbia said a great big YES! to initiatives authorizing marijuana for medical cases in their jurisdictions.
Then there's Newport, Maine. Desiree Davis, thirty-something, enjoyed mowing her lawn topless. But neighbor Mary Thompson didn't like it, so she collected 125 signatures to put the issue on the November '98 ballot. A spirited public discourse ensued, including the printing by Desiree's mother of T-shirts declaring the wearer to be an "Official Member of the Topless Lawn Mower's Club." (Yes, if you were really a topless mower member you would not be wearing a T-shirt, but it's the political statement that matters here. I The debate was held; the vote was taken, and Newport went on record 775 to 283 to let it all hang out when mowing your yard. No reports yet as to whether tourism is up in Newport during mowing season.
Now comes Election 2000, a space odyssey so far out that even Stanley Kubrick would have had a hard time imagining it. Fueled by an unprecedented level of corrupting cash, the political system has disconnected itself from the body politic and is accelerating away from us at approximately the speed of light, creating a deep and dark divide between what the people want from politics and what they'll get.
The result is not so much an election process as it is a burlesque. Consider this election report from the Chicago Tribune: "People formed long lines at some of the 5,700 voting stations, but most said they were voting only because they had been ordered to ... and few seemed to have any idea whom they were voting for. There had been no campaigning, and candidates had been selected in advance behind closed doors~ ensuring a satisfactory result regardless of who was chosen. Even the candidates seemed somewhat nonchalant about the process. [One] said he wasn't sure exactly what entity he was running for or even for how long he would serve. 'If I get elected, I'm sure I'll find out, and I'll let you know.' If elected [he] said his goal is to 'represent the people's will.' But he acknowledged he didn't know what the will of the people was."
The Tribune was reporting on an election for district legislature in Beijing, China, but it's not that much farther out than our own space odyssey. Most of our candidates, too, are selected in advance behind closed doors, ensuring "a satisfactory result" for the moneyed interests that do the selecting, no matter which ones ultimately are chosen in the formal balloting. While our candidates generally do know what office they're seeking, most are as lost as their Chinese counterparts on what the will of the people might be.
In a way, our current system is more cynical than the Chinese's, for it is much more widely hyped, providing all the trappings of a democratic process, yet withholding the substance, In the coming year, we'll get campaigning out the kazoo-bunting everywhere, cheering supporters artfully arranged at every campaign stop, caucuses and primaries, nominating speeches, balloons and confetti, polls, an assault of ads, televised debates (no third parties, please), campaign slogans and throbbing theme songs, an overdose of punditry by the puffheads of the media, and of course the election itself, even as the system draws the ring of actual participation tighter and tighter around a closed circle of special interests, Issues of consequence to ordinary folks will be ignored, deliberately avoided by tacit agreement of the two parties, or crassly used as ad fodder by candidates who will do nothing about them once in office, further trivializing the debate and putting more mock in demockracy.
This insidious system begs for ridicule. Last year, as part of the hype for his gubernatorial inauguration, which his consultants carefully orchestrated as a prelude to the formation of his presidential exploratory committee, George W. Bush included a pitch to the politically significant Latino voters by adding this slogan to his ceremonial banners: "Juntos Podemos," which translates as "Together We Can." Unfortunately, the Houston Chronicle reported it as "Juntos Pedemos," which translates loosely as "We fart together." For many Americans, Latino or otherwise, that's a fair summation of what today's political system delivers.
"I won't vote," Manuel Gonzalez told the New York Times. A superintendent at a store called Sunny Fruits and Vegetables in the Bronx, Manuel speaks for the multitudes when he says, "Doesn't count anyway-the politicians do what they like. It's not a people's country. It's a money country."
Tragically for America, Manuel is right. He can vote for Bushgorebradleymccainforbesadnauseam and nothing in his life will change. I happen to think he should vote - go third party, write in Daffy Duck, anything to show that he's there, that he casts an American's protest against the two-party con, that he won't be run out of the voting booth by the bastards yet, there's no denying the angry truth of his statement: The politicians do what they like ... it's a money country.
What kind of "election" is it that does not address, much less treat, the needs and aspirations of the millions and millions of Manuels who, after all, are America? What kind of democracy is it that can be perfectly satisfied, even glad, that Manuel won't vote? Indeed, despite there being an open presidential seat, despite the control of Congress being up for grabs, despite this being the first election of the third millennium- more Americans watched this January's Super Bowl than will show up for November's national balloting. We're staring at an electoral train wreck in the making, with the likelihood that fewer than half of the country's voters will be motivated to bother, and with the live possibility that this year will produce a lower.. national turnout than the scintillating Clinton-Dole matchup of '96 (third lowest in history), the thrilling Coolidge-Davis contest of 1924 (second lowest), and even rival the clunker of 1824 (lowest ever) when John Quincy Adams stumbled into the White House.
The good news is that there will be important exceptions to the general disinterest in campaign 2000-scattered rebellions by voters who find more ax handles like Jesse, Fred, and various ballot initiatives, as well as increasingly energetic campaigns by third parties. Whenever and wherever people find an election that matters and find that their participation will make a difference, they'll jump on it like a hungry grackle on a grasshopper, which puts the lie to the convenient wisdom of the conventionalists that voters simply don't care, are lazy louts, or are just happy with the way things are going. The "happy" theory is a recent favorite of some pundits and editorial writers, and all I can say to them is, if your IQ ever reaches fifty . . . sell!
Even the bad news-the mass nonparticipation of voters is potentially good news, because such a .mass will not be still for long. Like floodwaters swelling behind a dam, America's Noneoftheabove majority will find outlets. This is the political story of the millennium, not Bush, Gore, or whoever. Noneoftheabovers are the largest, fastest growing, and most important political force in our nation. But where will they go? They are nonideological and multi-ideological (sometimes in the same person), and they've been somewhere between intrigued and inspired by an Odd-bedfellow range of recent political rebels, from Jesse Jackson to Jesse Ventura, Jerry Brown to Ross Perot, Ralph Nader to Pat Buchanan. They are a populist force with the power to realign the old right-to-left, theoretical configuration of politics, Supplanting it with a more vital (and radical) top-to-bottom, real-life politics based on people's desire to take their country back from an aloof and arrogant power structure (often referred to colloquially and collectively as "The Assholes").
Two things for sure: (1) This mass will move; and (2) it will be messy. It will not move as one body, certainly not at first, but the anger and aspirations of so many cannot be contained, so the most dramatic and defining political events in the opening decade of the new century will flow from efforts by Noneoftheabovers to assert themselves. It will be messy because there is no road map for a flood-it cuts new channels, overflows boundaries, and swamps old structures. So far, it has been breaking out in spurts and rivulets, such as assorted third parties, maverick campaigns, and the term-limits movement.
But here's another messy reality that warrants reflection by those elites who imagine there will be no price to pay for having stiffed the majority, both politically and economically, lo these many years: The ballot is not the only form of political expression. For example, meet the militia. Yes, yes, it's considered politically proper to dismiss this skulking movement as a collection of paranoid gun kooks, zoned-out survivalists, and raw racists-but it's also politically stupid to dismiss such an explosive movement out of hand. The kooks, survivalists, and racists are there all right, yet the rank and file of many militias is made up of people we know ... or once knew. They're the family farmers of the eighties and nineties who were suckered by governmental policies that got them way overextended on farm credit while at the same time pushing massive overproduction that busted their crop prices, then allowed the bankers and hustlers to waltz in and merrily rip their land, livelihood, and pride from them. They are also former U.S. autoworkers who saw Washington wink while General Motors dumped seventy-three thousand of them on the trash heap of global greed in the late eighties and early nineties, while simultaneously creating approximately seventy-three thousand jobs in Mexico, Brazil, and other wage-busting outposts.
These were middle-class people who did what the system asks: be skilled and productive, work hard, be loyal, have a family, fight your country's wars, go to Church, obey the laws ... go vote. They'd earned a slice of the pie, working up to $30-$40,000 a year. Then, from far away, some incomprehensible force suddenly reached down their throats, grabbed 'em by the balls, and yanked their whole beings inside out. Where was the system, they wondered, that had told them that if they followed the straight and narrow they'd live the American Dream? The system was over on the side, smirking at them and coddling the brutes who'd done the yanking. What does either party have to say to these roughed-up, bedrock Americans? Where was either Clinton or Bush in '92, or Clinton or Dole in '96, as hundreds of thousands of them were getting stomped? Silence. Now, in 2000, Bush, Gore, & Gang don't even know they're still out there. "Oh, yeah," they might say if pressed, "I remember something on television some years ago about a farm crisis and some downsizings." Where do they think these people went? They don't think about them at all. These are America's disappeared.
But they are there, and if no one is beating a political path to their doors, it need not be a surprise that they'll try to forge their own political paths, even if that means arming themselves for ... what? Who knows, but there it is. This is what is at stake when the majority is shunted aside by the two-party system to become Noneoftheabovers. The populist movement is upon us as both the Republicans and Democrats narrow their attention even tighter on the affluent minority. But will this populism break out as a progressive and inclusive movement, as is possible? Or will it turn ugly, devolving into a reactionary, insular, bitter, brutish, and ultimately self-consuming rage, which is also possible?
At present, there is a huge hole in America that has to be filled. The top 20 percent of Americans-who own 96 percent of all stocks and bonds, who have 85 percent of all the net worth, who made 89 percent of all the gains in the stock market run-up of the nineties-now own the two big political parties. There has to be something for the 80 percent of Americans. Just as a shadow is not something, but the lack of something; just as loneliness and hunger are not something, but the lack of something; neither is Noneoftheabove something. It is the lack of a political say in America. If this pent-up majority is not to turn ugly, a new politics has to be forged that opens a broad new channel so these good people have a real say in the way things are being run and the way things are being shaped for the future. Ordinary people have to matter again.