By Mitch Potter
Washington Bureau
Barack Obama and Mitt Romney
Thestar.com reported:-
It’s all over but the crying. And the fury. And the bitter
recriminations, which many of America’s oldest political hands now fear
will explode like never before when the electoral whip comes down
Tuesday night, favouring one side just a hair over the other.
Yes, Barack Obama and Mitt Romney continue to make a show of these final three days, criss-crossing the key battlegrounds with closing arguments.
But the message-saturated United States, it seems, is tuning out — minds made up, desperate for the longest, ugliest, most expensive, most lie-infested campaign ever to just curl up and die.
The crowds have thinned on both sides as the candidates go wearily through the motions, a mark of mutually stalled momentum, in the wake of Hurricane Sandy. Get Out The Vote is becoming Get Off My Television. That doesn’t mean they don’t care. Far from it. On Wednesday morning, there will be rage.
Rage from Team Romney and the millions behind it, many of whom despise Obama in ways that defy description. Or rage from Team Obama’s half of the country, which will declare the White House bought and paid for by the former Massachusetts governor’s billionaire backers.
“It’s been dreadful — in many ways the worse campaign I’ve ever lived through,” said Stephen Hess, 79, the Brookings Institution presidential scholar who served four different White House teams in remarkably bipartisan fashion.
“We saw two honourable men absolutely pollute themselves in desperation to be president or remain president. Two serious, intelligent, previously honourable men who told untruths, changed their positions, refused to talk about many of the most serious issues we face, instead following advice of apparatchiks — Mad Men, really — who said tying themselves in intellectual and moral knots was the way to win.”
Romney, famously, was the more obvious flip-flopper, engineering a series of breathtaking policy pivots in the final weeks. Like a Looney Tunes cartoon in reverse, Romney unzipped the skin of an archconservative to reveal the moderate sheep within. If he wins, Democrats can only hope he won’t unzip one more time to reveal something else still.
But Obama, to the disappointment of many Democrats, chose not to sell his own story of improbable achievements, instead deploying an army of surrogates and the president’s own massive bankroll to assassinate Romney’s character, early and often.
It was a fear-based strategy that pounded the American psyche numb. To the point where, superficially, it has attained role-reversal to 2008, with Romney as the (paper-thin) candidate of Hope and Obama, warning that way lays danger.
One can parse whose smears were worse. Was it one of the half-dozen stunning remarks from Romney’s most caustic surrogate, former New Hampshire governor John Sununu, who time and again played the “birther” card, lamenting, “I wish this president would learn how to be an American.”
Or was one-man malarkey-factory Joe Biden, a vice-president who, when not hosting biker women on his lap or confusing which state he was in, managed perhaps the most specious comment in vice-presidential history, telling a largely African-American audience of 800 the Republicans are going to “put y’all back in chains.”
As a media experience, it all began much more enjoyably, observes Robert Thompson, the founding director of Syracuse University’s Bleier Centre for Television and Popular Culture.
“It did get terribly ugly. But before that the Republican primary race enjoyed a life of its own for sheer entertainment value. Whether it was Herman Cain unable to remember what Libya was or (Texas Gov.) Rick Perry freezing up trying to list one of the three parts of government he would eliminate, the country couldn’t get enough,” Thompson said.
“You didn’t need Saturday Night Live to satirize it. The comedy was built in to the real thing.”
But Thompson offers his own scathing review of the Twitterization of the race — and the overall assumption that the onset of social media has taken the place of traditional political analysis.
“Arianna Huffington, at one point, declared the debates meaningless without Twitter. But if you look at her own twitter feed, much of what she had to say was snarky and meaningless.
“My favourite, though, was a tweet that complained, “I can’t believe all politics is reduced to sound-bytes.’ Twitter makes television sound bytes seem like War and Peace,” Thompson said.
But few doubt future generations looking back on Election 2012 will fix first and foremost on the lifting of the campaign spending floodgates, with unprecedented money flowing as a consequence of the 2010 Supreme Court ruling that determined corporations, unions, and other third-party groups as “people” — entitled to spend without restraint.
“The sheer extent and vehemence on both sides, paid for by groups you’ve never heard of, twisting facts and presenting things in dark and awful ways — that’s what 2012 was to me,” said David Biette, director of the Canada Institute at Washington’s Woodrow Wilson Centre.
“We’ve always complained about negative ads. But the Citizens United decision opened up a volume and intensity that was new. It’s sinful, how much money was spent. And how do you go about changing it, after the Supreme Court has ruled?”
Both sides express confidence in victory — perhaps it’s only a mask, hiding fears of imminent loss. But with Americans now able to self-select polls that tell them what they want to hear, and partisan media to reinforce it, the prospects for Wednesday morning fury appear set in stone.
“There will be heartbreak and anger for Democrats if Obama loses. And for Republicans, not so much heartbreak, but perhaps more fury,” Biette said. “The hatred for Obama in some circles is unfathomable, absolute. It Election Day shows it to be as close as it seems, a significant number of people will believe it was stolen. The questions about fairness will hang over it all.”
Paul Frazer, a former Canadian diplomat and now a Washington consultant, worries how the poison will spill over into the next Congress. An Obama victory, almost certainly, will mean a continuation of the Bickersonian Era of congressional gridlock, with a Tea Party-infused House of Representatives at loggerheads with what is likely to again by a Democratic majority in the Senate. But a Romney victory, he says, may not be much different.
“People always think the president of the United States has more power than he really does. But the gloomier part of the scenario is that we’ll get more of the same from Washington. Whether Obama wins or Romney wins, all indication is the other side will not accept a slim margin as a mandate,” Frazer said.
“So they hurtle toward the end of the year, a lame-duck Congress, with very little time to get back to the business of avoiding a fiscal cliff and all that implies.”
Hess, a former staffer to the Eisenhower and Nixon administrations and an adviser to Presidents Ford and Carter, offers the glimmer of hope that American democracy was designed to withstand everything, including an election as poisonous as this.
“So the curtain comes down on a really perverse episode in our democracy, one that appealed to our worst instincts. Yes, there will be anger,” Hess said.
“But fast-forward to next Jan. 20 at noon — the president will be inaugurated and I’m pretty certain we go back to business as usual. The forces of reality take over. The forces of our Constitution and our strange system of checks and balances take over. We muddle through, even if we’re back to the same gridlock we were in before,” Hess said.
“So you ask yourself, how should we look back on this? Maybe the best thing is to just forget about it. Maybe that’s what American elections are becoming.
“We hold our noses, we plug our ears and we go forward. The world is not going to sink into the sea. Once the smoke clears, especially if we find ourselves with the same president, this entire exercise may not have changed anything other than our offended sensibilities.”
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