Not Dead Yet: Democracy in America

At the risk of stating the obvious, there has never been a Presidential election like this. That's not hyperbole, it's simple fact. Many have pointed out that this year is unusual in that there's no incumbent or sitting veep on either side. Just add that that has never been the case in the era when nominations are decided by popular vote. Add too the surprise that the much-decried front-loaded primary schedule has actually worked quite well (more by accident than by design), with the early states showing the candidates from different angles and winnowing the field by maybe 50% -- but leaving the ultimate decision to a broad swath of the electorate on Super Tuesday and beyond.

Also throw in the mix the huge number of debates in a broad menu of formats that have given anyone interested a chance to assess and re-assess the candidates. Finally, note that money has not been decisive so far, and that candidates who have not been particularly well tied in to existing power structures (Obama, Ron Paul) have been quite successful raising money through grass-roots, online channels.

No doubt that democracy in America needs fixing. The flood of special interest money and lobbying influence; our creaky electoral machinery; the ever more scientifically deranged gerrymandering; the flood of negative, manipulative advertising; the massive media exposure of every personal failing and foible; the bitter partisanship; the current administration's shocking mismanagement of foreign and fiscal policy; and, most important, this administration's assault on civil liberties and the balance of power between branches -- made me, for one, wonder whether the power of the people to effect change through voting was slipping away as fast as our position in the world. And it's still possible that future shocks, like say a major terrorist attack, will generate enough fear to induce Congress and people to acquiesce in another major power grab by the next president, as the Democrats have rolled over before Bush's institutionalization of torture, suspension of habeas, and eviscerating of FISA. But can anyone doubt that we have real choices in this election? Democracy's defining power -- the ability to change course -- is not dead yet.

Obama's message is often derided as gauzy. I think it's substantive - the fruit of twenty years of ripening thought -- on the largest issue of all: how to make democracy function better. The elements include restricting the power of lobbying; a well articulated approach to bipartisanship; and -- most recently, developed in response to the double-barreled Clinton assault -- restoring trust by insisting on a high standard of truth in political discourse. It's the last, with the Clintons as foil, that could be the game-changer in the nominating battle.

Many who have succumbed this season to a modicum of idealism will turn bitterly disillusioned if we end with, say, a Romney-Clinton election. That shouldn't be. When the choice is open, we should trust the electorate. I would still more than half expect Hillary to be an excellent president, angered though I've been by the assault on Obama. Romney has the smarts and managerial skill to be effective, repellent as I find his positions and his position-shifting. The worst danger is another electoral malfunction of the kind that brought us Bush. It's the failures of democracy -- rather than electoral outcomes that we may not like -- that is the true danger.

A Democrat "for" McCain

Financiers, who know how to hedge, often contribute to candidates in both parties. Why not the rest of us? This letter accompanied my contribution today to the McCain campaign:

Dear Senator McCain:

While I will almost certainly vote for the Democratic nominee in 2008, I am contributing to your campaign because I fear for the future of American democracy should a proponent of torture and the destruction of American civil liberties such as Rudy Depends-who-does-it Giuliani or Mitt Double Guantanamo Romney win a major party nomination.

This contribution is to honor your sustained and essential opposition to torture, suspension of habeas, assertions of unlimited executive power, and wholesale flouting of the Bill of Rights. Should you win the Republican nomination, I will rest assured that Americans are not prepared to sell their ancient liberties for a little bit of perceived security.

I should add that I believe that your support of President Bush’s misadventure in Iraq contributed to that disaster; that your campaigning for Bush in the 2004 election helped bring on four more years of assault on our core liberties; and that the ‘compromise’ you green-lighted in the 2006 Military Commissions Act ratified the Administration’s abuses. I am also disappointed by your repudiation of your own principled opposition to the Bush Administration’s irresponsible tax cuts, and by your cozying up to corrupt theocrats.

Nonetheless, on the all-important issue of torture and civil liberties, history will recognize that you stood as the conscience of a party run amok with fear-mongering and power-grabbing.

American democracy cannot function without (at least) two viable major parties. Should you win the nomination, the Republican Party will have taken a giant step toward a return to responsible governance.

Voodoo Video?

Today's Times (Nov. 11) ran This is your brain on politics , an interpretation by neuroscientists of swing voters' brain activity while they watched presidential candidates in action. The report raises more questions than it answers --

1. In the selection of the still and video shots of each candidate, was there a method for screening out researcher bias?

2. Was there a method for determining whether the stump speech video represents a candidate's average performance?

3. Are emotions and mental activities as firmly associated with discrete areas of the brain as the article implies? For example, would neuroscientists generally agree that the anterior cingulate cortex "is aroused when a person feels compelled to act in two different ways but must choose one"? Might that same region be stimulated by other kinds of mental/emotional activity?

Experiments on this frontier are fascinating. Sometimes, though, the reported results read a bit like a video version of phrenology, the nineteenth century pseudo-science that purported to determine personality by examining head shape.

On the other hand, research showing that people's political reactions grow more hard-line and punitive when they have just been made aware of death or the possibility of disaster seems to me truly compelling. The "before and after" comparison in that case is clean.

The New York Times reports that in a community meeting in Iowa, Rudolph Giuliani, asked whether waterboarding is torture, responded: “It depends on how it’s done. It depends on the circumstances. It depends on who does it.”

Thank you, Rudy, for clarifying how President Bush can keep repeating "we do not torture" in the face of massive documentation that for the past six years the U.S. has explicitly authorized and systematically implemented "enhanced interrogation techniques" -- including the simulated drowning universally understood to be denoted by the term "waterboarding" and long prosecuted by the U.S. as a war crime. Now the logic is clear: if we do it, it's not torture.