November 2010 - Electoral Blues
It was a treat – of sorts – to be back in Australia during the Federal Election.
Not that I could vote, however.
What with my current status as a non-resident, that privilege is denied me, which is upsetting. During this last cycle I think I had one day in which to register after the election was called, which is useless to a man on the road with wife and kids and several hundred miles ahead of him.
So I watched from the sidelines as the rather dull b-opera played out on the national stage. As we barreled through hundreds upon hundreds of miles of Australian highways and wended our way through two-lane, and occasional one lane, country roads, Laura and I saw thousands of corrugated plastic political roadside signs. Fresh young faces and a few wrinkly old ones photo-shopped for our electoral pleasure.
(NOTE – If you’re looking for an indicator re: the lack lusterity evident in our recent federal campaigning, I was searching (as I wrote the previous paragraph) for a pair of relevant epithets to throw against each other as examples of the vigorous campaigning and partisanship.
All I came up with was the fairly tiresome and mildly moronic ‘budgie-smuggler’ line.
I almost went retromingent when I first heard the phrase ‘budgie-smuggler’ about 20 years ago.
Man it was great to be seventeen.)
Focusing back on our recent Australian election, I wasn’t a big fan of either Julia Gillard or Tony Abbot. Actually, now that I think about it, I wasn’t a fan of either of them at all. Sure I had a horse in the race, but it seemed to be one of those run-arounds in which it didn’t matter too much who won: things were gonna turn out pretty much the same regardless.
It hovers, then, in stark contrast to the coming mid-term election here in the US. If you recall, I commented on the inauguration of Barak Obama in this column about a year and a half ago. After seeing the wild enthusiasm of the black kids in my school – most of the white kids were pretty happy with the outcome, too – I was cautiously optimistic. I didn’t get all hope-and-changey swept away, but I work with these kids every day. I like to see them happy. I like to think the best of and for them. I want to hope that things will be ok for them.
About Obama’s politics specifically, I wasn’t a fan. Our social ideologies are quite different and his resume seemed pretty thin for what is a massively important job, but still I was ready to give him a go. To listen to him. To give him the respect due.
He was in a position to get things done.
The enthusiasm surrounding the idea of Barak Obama helped propel his Democrat Party into filibuster-proof majorities in the House and Senate. It was like a tick in every box, if you’re planning on flexing a little muscle.
A bare minimum of analysis behind the slogans of 2008 reveals a man who is very much to the left, but Obama was hired based on what were essentially a set of center-left promises that he made to the American people. Which is where he should have stayed, if he wanted to avoid alienating a good portion of the population, because as much as the American and world media swooned over him, Obama’s electoral majority over his conservative rival John McCain was not much at all. Just a percentage point or two.
So despite the hype and the hope-and-change sloganeering, he did not possess a broad mandate for change.
But Obama and his party’s readiness to flex after the Bush Presidency – especially in the context of a devastating and drawn-out recession – has led to what many commentators see as an over-stepping, a dislocation and a misunderstanding of the will of the majority of the American people. I don’t have the space here to go into how specific Administration policies have upset the populace, but the have. In retrospect the equation is simple: a center-left campaign from a personally appealing candidate (when he’s on message…) can win over enough people in an essentially center-right country to get him elected. But should he veer wildly to the left, then he’s heading for a car crash.
Which brings us to November 2010 – what we call over here the ‘mid-terms’. Obama himself isn’t up for election, but across the board the elections on November 2 constitute an important referendum on the job his side is doing.
I think Obama’s side has set itself up for a beating.
A lot of the discussion about the broad anti-incumbent dissatisfaction here in the US has centered on the Tea Party movement which essentially sprouted up out of nowhere after a cable news commentator, Rick Santelli, went on a bit of an unscripted rant about Obama Administration’s mortgage policy, and millions of people caught the vibe and thought – “Hey – that’s what I was thinking!”
These ordinary folk from fly-over country (the middle of the country far away from the coasts – you need to “fly-over” them to get anywhere “important…”) have caught a good deal of flack from the political and media establishment, which it is to be expected, if only because their numbers are such that they represent a significant threat to the ‘business as usual’ status quo. I know a lot of these people and their supporters and I believe the level of disrespect they have caught is unwarranted.
Whomever wins, however, by the time this publication arrives in your mailbox we’ll have a better idea who represents the mainstream and who is the radical. Kookaburra