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Dean
Fades, Kerry Soars
Clark
Waits in the Wings
Editorial by Rudolph Lewis
With their "uplifting"
messages John Kerry, Senator of Massachusetts, and John
Edwards, Senator of North Carolina, won Iowa. Howard Dean, the
darling of the flagging left, held on for a disappointing third
place with only 18% of the votes, about half of Kerry's votes.
In the voice of Iowans, middle-class White
Americans have reiterated their stance: the “Left” and
liberalism in the Democratic Party and the nation will not be
tolerated. This political scenario does not bid well for the
interests of the majority of black Americans. Their issues of
social justice – in education, criminal justice, and economic
parity (all of which have a high price tag) – will again be
ignored in this upcoming presidential campaign and the next
administration.
For the last thirty years, White Americans
have steadily moved toward the right. The political spectrum has
shifted so much so that most Americans consider the millionaire
governor of Vermont a “leftist.” Partially, this is
the case, I suspect, because social activists like white
middle-class labor unionists such as SEIU and the bureaucracy of
the AFL-CIO, desperately trying to organize low-paid service
workers, jumped on his internet bandwagon.
We black Americans who are poor and powerless
and tend to ignore electoral politics remain keenly aware that
this is a white man’s country and that the Congress, the White
House, and the Supreme Court act first and foremost in the
interest of the White middle-class. The less than statesman-like
Al Sharpton—in contradistinction to the diplomatic Carol
Mosely-Braun—made it clear in the last Democratic debate that
Democrats like Dean – liberal, centrist, or conservative –
do not have black interests foremost because these fellows know
they have to win the hearts of White Americans.
The
primary interest of White Americans is the retention of the
status quo—nationally and internationally. Let's be real,
White Americans enjoy being No. 1 and they are willing to shed
blood and capital to stay No.1. Simply, that means sustaining an
imperial army that will not be withdrawing from the Mid-East
within the next decade, which means the loss of hundreds of
billions of dollars that will not go into solving domestic
issues such as health-care access, shortage of education
funding, cheap labor and underemployment, which eventually lead
to high incarceration or early death..
White
domestic concerns encompass fear of international threats, taxes
on the middle-class, and the loss of middle-class jobs or
income. These are primary individual and family-oriented issues.
This great cross-section of secular White Americans also have a
sensitive ear for the issues of religious conservatives—social
respectability and conformity, with their hostility to abortion,
gay marriages, illicit drugs, etc. and strong support of police
repression, harsh sentencing, and the growth of penal
institutions.
In
short, White Americans have little interest in social reforms or
social justice—which are the primary needs of the white and
Hispanic poor and most black Americans.
The plain fact is that President Bush retains
the support of nearly six in 10 Americans—many of these are
Democrats. Though many White Americans believe that the
president has taken the
country in a “very, very radical direction" in starting
the War against Iraq and depleting the federal coffers, White
Americans out of prideful arrogance are committed to “helping
the Iraqi people” and defending and securing the oil fields of
the Mid-East. That is the reason that the campaign of Dennis
Kucinich fell flat as a pancake.
Aware of the polls, Democrats know that a
race with Bush will be close and that presently he would win 48
percent to 46 percent—his edge boosted and sustained by the
Religious Right and by patriotic loyalty that he is a “war
president.” Yet Bush remains vulnerable because about 2.3 million jobs
have been lost since he took office and a budget surplus was
turned into a large $500 billion deficit.
The Democrats, much of the public believes,
would better handle such domestic issues as the economy,
prescription drugs for the elderly, health insurance, Medicare,
the budget deficit, immigration, taxes, and education. They are
not so certain, however, that the Democrats would do as well as
the Republican with international threats to America's No. 1
status.
So the Democrats in looking for a candidate
to beat
George Bush emphasize status-quo or "centrist"
qualities. These they see in candidates like Vietnam veteran
John Kerry with his wealthy family connections, Southern homeboy
John Edwards, and retired General Wesley Clark. Both Edwards and
Clark’s Southern connections are seen as potential electoral
advantages.
Of these three, with respect to the War
Against Iraq, the former Republican Wesley Clark, who has
received the support of documentary
filmmaker Michael Moore and has leveled the charge that
the Bush administration has not been "serious about going
after terrorism," is the most curious.
Clark, a former NATO supreme commander now
campaigning in New Hampshire, proposed giving the North Atlantic
Treaty Organization (NATO) a new role in tracking down
international terrorists and finding fugitives such as Osama bin
Laden
He believes, “We can lift the cloud of fear
that's been hanging over America. Because we've got an
administration that from the beginning didn't do everything it
could have done to have prevented 9/11. And after 9/11 they [the
Bush Administration] took us into a war in Iraq that we didn't
have to be in. They weren't serious about going after terrorism.
They were serious about going after Saddam Hussein."
Clark said, "I was consistently against
this [going after Saddam] from the time the guys in the Pentagon
told me two weeks after 9/11 that we were attacking Iraq. It
didn't make any sense to me. . . . This was a war we didn't have
to fight. It was an elective war."
The awful fact remains, whether the Democrats
manage or not to squeak out a win against President Bush, hard
times are in the cards for an indefinite period for most black
Americans, especially the poor. Of course, our comfortable black
elected officials and spokespersons will continue to sustain the
pretense that salvation is just around the corner.
posted 2004 *
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update 2 July 2008 |
