The 24-hour news stations are gleeful about the protracted nature of the Democratic Party’s primary process. John McCain, the Republican Senator from Arizona, has already sewn up his Party’s nomination and is busy raising funds and planning strategy for the fall campaign. The horse race between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama remains inconclusive. The Pennsylvania primary on April 22, 2008 could determine who the more electable candidate is. Also in the making is the Democratic National Committee’s attempt to find an ingenuous and acceptable way for the voters in Florida and Michigan to legitimately participate in the decision-making process before the Party’s Convention at the end of August.
At this stage of the race, irrespective of the state, whether it is in the form of a direct primary or a caucus, voters are turning out in record numbers. The candidacy of Barack Obama has ignited a new generation of Americans and has engaged them in the electoral process.
The television cameras have overexposed the remaining three candidates and any avid listener to CNN is now able to recite the stump speech of McCain, Clinton and Obama almost word for word. What would take the campaign to another level would be sharper questioning from the press corps on economic policy and foreign policy.
John McCain, the Republican candidate, will have to overcome the age factor and the polls are already signifying that a quarter of the electorate finds his birth date worrying. McCain is not the most aesthetically appealing of candidates. He suffers from a dearth of energy and he is a lackluster speaker. Like most politicians, his ability to articulate is confined to age-old platitudes.
John McCain is a man totally lacking in introspection. His answer to the economic crisis in America is trite, like cut taxes, and reduce regulation. If the federal deficit is over $400 billion, if the accumulated federal debt keeps mounting and weakening the American dollar, how deep should be the tax cuts? At a time when the economic crisis is deteriorating, McCain will have to demonstrate a better grasp of economic policy.
An issue that has not been raised in the campaign but is relevant to the economic crisis is the growing inequality in the country. The tax cuts initiated by the sitting President and the suggestion by his proposed successor to make them permanent, will not only exacerbate the debt but also aggravate the growing inequality in the country.
McCain has spoken about the need for the federal government to retrain dislocated workers for the new jobs and has argued that the community colleges can do a better job of retooling workers than the federal government. McCain’s position is that the loss of manufacturing jobs cannot be reversed and the American economy has benefited from NAFTA and from expanding world trade.
Both Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama have declared that they will renegotiate the NAFTA Treaty and in the future insist on environmental and labor standards and presumably will make the American industry more competitive in the world market. This raises the larger question of globalization and its impact on the American economy, the standard of living in America and its impact on the American middle class.
For most of the 20th century, the American economy dominated the world economy. That hegemony has evaporated in the 21st century. This raises questions about the inept handling of the macro-economic indicators by the George Bush administration. The massive accumulation of surplus profits by multi-national corporations has not been shared with workers and has made the American middle class hostile to globalization. At this stage none of the three candidates has demonstrated a comprehensive grasp of globalization.
In recent weeks particularly crystallizing during the Ohio and Texas primaries, national security concerns have risen to the fore. Who is best prepared to make decisions when the occupant in the White House gets a call in the dead of night? Who has the experience to keep the nation safe?
Hillary Clinton has made the case that she has visited 82 countries, have met with many of the principal leaders of the world and based on her experience, she should be the occupant answering the red phone. Presumably, it is conceded that John McCain who has longevity in the Senate and working for decades on national security matters is well prepared to answer the red phone in the dead of night.
John McCain is a product of America’s military industrial complex. He is, indeed, comfortable talking about military matters. He was an enthusiast for the pre-emptive war against Saddam Hussein’s Iraq and vigorously supported the surge that has been instrumental in reducing the level of violence in Baghdad and its immediate environs. He is prepared to stay in Iraq for 100 years, if necessary. He is also ready to go to war with Iran.
McCain represents an America that sees the military strike as solving the world’s problems. Just as America waged a cold war with the expansionist-prone Soviet-Union which is now non-existent, the United States must wage war against Islamic Jihadists. The world for McCain is a dangerous place and only America’s military might can bring security to the civilized world.
Hillary Clinton would not articulate her view of the world in the muscular way that a product of the military-industrial-complex would. Although she favored the war initially and in the throes of the war took positions to the right of the sitting President, she is now in favor of withdrawing troops from Iraq. But I would not expect Hillary Clinton to examine extant American foreign policy and make any fundamental changes. She would be less adventurous than George Bush or John McCain but would pursue a conventional approach to America’s relationship to the world.
Barack Obama has placed much emphasis on diplomacy and being unafraid to open a dialogue with the presumed enemies of America. He has been adamant about shrinking the influence of the lobbyists and special interests that have hog-tied legislation that would benefit the majority of Americans. His campaign has built a strong base of over a million donors and thus, unlike his remaining counterparts, if he picks up the red telephone in the White House, he is not beholden to special interests and is in a better position to make an objective judgment. Nonetheless, Obama’s advisers are all molded in the American foreign policy establishment and even though his candidacy has caught the attention of the world community, there is little to suggest that he would articulate a vision of America in the world separate from the obsession with militarism.
The world needs to find a way to break out of the circular causation of settling disputes with war and more destruction. That has been the case of the Israelis and the Palestinians since 1948. That is presently the case in Lebanon with periodical assassinations of Hezbollah leaders and assassination of leaders from the faction supportive of the United States.
For the United States, the preoccupation with the role of the world’s policeman is an extremely costly enterprise. The United States spends almost a trillion dollars per year on its military budget. Approximately $700 billion is spent from the Pentagon’s budget and when veteran’s expenditures and atomic weapons and research are included, the figure mounts to a massive trillion. America has 700 military bases sprawled all over the world. The sitting President’s recent visit to Africa resulted in the United States establishing a military base in Liberia, the only country in that West African region which sought to come under America’s security blanket.
The mindset of the military-industrial complex is bankrupting America. It is one of the reasons why America is falling behind in the global economy. So much of its research and development are in the unproductive realm of war and destruction.
In the 1950s when there was an attempt to build a social movement committed to world peace and opposed to the use of atomic weapons, the American government at that juncture saw world peace as threatening to America’s national security interest. W.E.B DuBois, a leader in that movement was indicted with four other colleagues for their work in the Peace Information Center, which the Truman administration argued was an agent of the Soviet Union. The judge threw out the case as the government could not prove the allegations.
The world is in desperate need of a President who will not embark on pre-emptive war but will lead the world in pre-emptive strikes for peace similar to what Kofi Annan rendered to the people of Kenya after the inter-tribal warfare broke out after the tampering with the democratic elections.
At present, America has lost its way in the world. At least the three standing candidates should be asked to spell out their vision for a peaceful world. As the campaign enters its final stretch, this is the appropriate time for the leaders and the voters to become more introspective and ponder on the possibility of America reshaping its image in the world with a renewed emphasis on the abolition of nuclear weapons and a bold march to settling disputes peacefully.
