The Most Important Presidential Election Ever. Really.by BAR Managing Editor Bruce Dixon
First check out this exclusive 60 Minutes interview with brother Billy of SleptOn.com.
Every four years we hear that the current presidential election is undoubtedly the most important one in our lifetimes, perhaps the most significant in all the long history of the republic. We heard it (and some of us said it) four years ago and will say it four years from now. And two years hence we will entertain each other with that famous blast from the past about how the current midterm elections are the most key and crucial midterm contests ever. Bet on it. Everybody says it, every two and four years, so it must be at least a little but true, right?The idea of the vote is a potent and powerful idea, one that has seized hold of human political imaginations worldwide. All over this planet, ordinary people will work and organize and suffer and fight and die for the right to vote. At the dawn of the 21st century it's rare to find anybody, anyplace on earth who would suggest that people should not have the right to vote in elections that freely choose their rulers. Even the most despotic and least democratic ruling elites are forced to conduct sham elections to bolster their own legitimacy. Thus battle for the idea of the vote has been one.
The struggles now are over whether ordinary people will be able to exercise their right to vote, and whether their choices in elections will have any meaning. These battles are far from won. The Indian killers, the northern slave traders and the southern slave masters who wrote the US Constitution restricted the vote to white males with property, and didn't trust even this group. Originally they elected state legislators and those legislators elected senators and presidents. Ordinary people pushed back, and in the two centuries since women, the descendants of slaves and remaining Native Americans and others are now permitted to vote.
For their part, our American elites have fight back on multiple fronts, first to restrict who can vote, and to limit which candidates under what circumstances can run for office and whether their messages are allowed to reach the public. The wave of spurious voter purges, new restrictions on voter registration drives, ballot access laws that bar any candidates apart from Republicans and Democrats, and a privately owned public media system that only allows candidates with loads of money to get their messages out all operate to limit, frustrate and make our votes irrelevant.
For a long time too, our American elites have worked to take more and more matters that affect our daily lives outside the realm where elections and the vote can affect them all. Although the airwaves, along with the cable, internet and phone rights of way are owned by the public in the US, all these are in private hands. You can't vote your phone or cable bill down, and you can't vote to extend free internet access to schools and colleges in your town or city. The federal government charges broadcast TV station licensees in big markets like New York and Los Angeles nothing for their licenses worth billions of dollars, enforces no meaningful public services obligations upon them, and without public knowledge or approval has granted them $80 billion worth of new digital TV channels. Port and airport authorities and other unelected public bodies are brought into existence to levy taxes and spend public money with little accountability, and in the last two decades hundreds of government functions, from child support enforcement to fleet management to conduct of the elections, prisons and the military itself have been placed in the hands of unaccountable private corporations --- privatized.
So the terrain of the struggle for real democracy has indeed shifted. It goes far beyond the vote. But still, the vote matters.
Like the last several US presidential elections, this is one in which the idea of the vote, the idea that people do still have the right to determine our collective destiny, is more important than the choices we actually have. Four years ago more than sixty percent of the American people favored a speedy withdrawal from the war in Iraq, a national health care system and more funding for public education. Thanks to ballot access and campaign finance laws, and a privately owned media system that restricts the messages which reach voters, Americans were forced to choose between a pro-war Republican and a pro-war Democrat, both of whom favored letting private insurance companies run our health care system, and both of whom supported the cynically misnamed "No Child Left Behind" legislation facilitating the de-funding and privatization of public education.
Thanks to a privately owned media system that prevents campaign messages dissenting from the corporate status quo from reaching more than a tiny fraction of voters, neither Nader nor McKinney will be contenders. All the available polling indicates that Obama will win the election, even though McKinney and Nader are far closer to the actual opinions of voters on issues ranging from health care to foreign policy and education, and economic policy. The election, if it isn't stolen, will do what elections do, and confer legitimacy upon the administration in power.
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