FEAR, HATRED, AND DECEPTION: THE DECAY OF DEMOCRACY IN THE U.S.
Joseph A. Buttigieg  

At the end of July, Senator John Kerry was riding the crest of a wave of confidence and optimism that his supporters believed would carry him all the way to the White House. The carefully choreographed Democratic National Convention had successfully projected an image of a historically fractious party solidly united behind a leader with the credentials to assume the role of the nation's commander-in-chief. In his speech, concluding the convention, Kerry stressed his military experience and his patriotism-this was meant to forestall the usual Republican criticism of Democrats as weak or `soft” on matters of national security. He also dwelled on the traditional Democratic themes of social justice, equity, tolerance, and respect for diversity. Above all, though, Kerry strove to portray himself as a leader determined to rise above and heal the divisiveness that currently bedevils the U.S. His message was clear: a country at war and living in constant fear of another terrorist attack should be spared the additional bitterness that normally accompanies a hotly contested election. In an almost utopian appeal for national unity and political sobriety, Kerry said:
I want to address these next words directly to President George W. Bush. In the weeks ahead let's be optimists, not just opponents. Let's build unity in the American family, not angry division. Let's honor this nation's diversity. Let's respect one another. And let's never misuse for political purposes the most precious document in American history, the Constitution of the United States.
My friends, the high road may be harder but it leads to a better place. And that's why Republicans and Democrats must make this election a contest of big ideas, not small-minded attacks. This is our time to reject the kind of politics calculated to divide race from race, region from region, group from group. Maybe some just see us divided into those red states and blue states, but I see us as one America - red, white and blue.
Those words were probably also meant to leave a favorable impression on the relatively small number of undecided voters that will ultimately determine the outcome of this presidential election. Still, Kerry's rhetoric was consistent with his campaign behavior and with the general tenor of the Democratic National Convention. With very few and relatively minor exceptions, the speakers at the convention refrained from directly or personally attacking George Bush and vice-president Dick Cheney. Until then, both Kerry and his running mate, Senator John Edwards, had assiduously crafted speeches with positive messages for their campaign appearances and, as in their paid television and radio messages, never stooped to vilify their opponents. To be sure, various autonomous anti-Bush groups had spent (and continue to spend) millions of dollars on harsh political advertisements attacking the President and his administration. And, of course, the extraordinary success of Michael Moore's film, `Fahrenheit 9/11,” was worth more than a million negative ads. To some extent, the operations of the myriad independent liberal and progressive groups served as a counterweight to the barrage of negative political advertisements on the which the Bush campaign (and the constellation of conservative organizations that support it) spent enormous amounts of money in an effort to discredit Kerry and undermine his credibility. From the very beginning, the Bush's re-election campaign has been-and remains-an anti-Kerry campaign. By contrast, until late August, Kerry kept trying to build a pro-Kerry movement and to prevent his campaign from becoming merely an anti-Bush united front.
For a while, it seemed that John Kerry had adopted the proper strategy. The morning after the conclusion of the Democratic convention, the New York Times political analyst, Todd Purdum, wrote: `After a year in which he has been borne along more by the Democrats' lust to defeat Mr. Bush than by any special passion to elect him, Mr. Kerry may well have turned a corner on the path toward inspiring his party, and inviting swing voters to put him in the White House.” In fact, the opinion polls taken in late July and early August showed Kerry pulling ahead of George Bush. Within weeks, however, Kerry's lead in the polls started to dwindle and by the time the Republican National Convention got under way, it had completely vanished. Such unexpected, rapid reversals in a candidate's standing are normally the result of a major blunder, some scandalous discovery, or a major event that has the effect of a deus ex machina. In August, however, the steady stream of bad news from Iraq and the anemic economic figures that routinely showed up on the business pages of the daily papers should have strengthened rather than weakened Kerry's standing. Nor did Kelly or Edwards say anything shocking or even surprising on the campaign trail; and there was not even a whiff of scandal.
As it turned out, however, Kerry did commit a major blunder-a blunder epitomized by three sentences in his high-minded speech at the convention: `My friends, the high road may be harder but it leads to a better place. And that's why Republicans and Democrats must make this election a contest of big ideas, not small-minded attacks.” Kerry failed to understand that, in the present political climate, `big ideas” count for very little, `small-minded attacks” are very effective, and the `high road” is perhaps more likely to lead to electoral defeat than to `a better place.” It took Kerry and his campaign strategists about four weeks to realize their mistake-a mistake that cost them dearly. Throughout the entire month of August, Kerry chose to ignore the political storm generated by a small group calling itself Swift Boat Veterans for Truth that spent a mere $500,000 to have a few television stations in ten or eleven states air a short political advertisement full of verifiably false statements contradicting all that is known and thoroughly documented about John Kerry's displays of courage and leadership during combat in Vietnam. The cable TV news channels picked up the veterans' fabricated story, showed their advertisement as part of their `news coverage”, thus ensuring a vast audience for it (at no expense to the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth group), and invited Kerry's mendacious denouncers to their studios for interviews, discussions, and debates about their baseless allegations. Kerry ignored the furor. Perhaps he thought an Olympian stance, a posture of indifference in the face of such dirty tricks would make him look more presidential, more like a serious statesman engaged with the `big issues” that are at stake in this election. Perhaps he thought that Senator John McCain's denunciation of the brazen liars would utterly discredit them. Perhaps he thought that he could shame George Bush into condemning the blatantly unfounded attacks. Whatever John Kerry was thinking in August, he was wrong on all counts. He certainly underestimated how vicious the cohorts of the militant right can be; he did not fully appreciate how effective their dirty methods have been in the past; and he seemed to forget that George Bush has never demurred from using underhanded methods to attain his goals. Smear tactics have been a staple of the right for a long, long time.
A succinct account of George Bush's despicable tactics was provided by the widely published U.S.-based British conservative political observer, Andrew Sullivan. Sullivan, who is not by any means the only traditional conservative who has been openly critical of Bush, wrote as follows in the Sunday Times of London on 28 August:
Most politicians who found [an easy way to avoid the military draft] during Vietnam might be leery of attacking the war record of a man who volunteered for duty, took shrapnel, and got Purple Hearts for his courage and heroism. But not Bush. Recall that in 2000, at a very similar juncture in a tight presidential race against John McCain, the Bush campaign also unleashed the hounds against a man who had been imprisoned and tortured at the hands of the Viet Cong. Flyers appeared throughout South Carolina claiming that McCain had a black child, that he was the "fag candidate," that his wife was a drug addict, that his experience under torture had made him unstable, that he had "betrayed" veterans, and on and on. None of this could be traced directly to Bush, but no one was under any illusions. In public, Bush said he honored McCain's service. But his surrogates smeared him relentlessly. And McCain told Bush to his face in a debate that he should be "ashamed" by his campaign tactics. But shame is not something that comes easily to this president.
Whatever indignation McCain might have expressed four years ago, he now has no compunction appearing alongside George Bush on the campaign trail; he was also one of the major speakers at the Republican National Convention. McCain did condemn the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, but through his active support of Bush he is lending legitimacy to the president's campaign rather than drawing attention to the alarmingly dysfunctional condition of democracy in the U.S.. Indeed, McCain's behavior is a dispiriting example of how a politician's aspirations can drag him into the cesspool of odium that U.S. politics has become. It seems that McCain is planning to make another run for the presidency in 2008, and therefore he needs to demonstrate his allegiance to the Republican Party today. In his primary campaign against George Bush in 2000, McCain took the high road, earned the admiration of a huge swath of the population , , , and lost!
If, after the undeserved battering he took from the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, John Kerry still harbored some flicker of hope that he would be rewarded at the ballot box for taking the high road and for debating the big issues rather than vilifying his opponent, then it was definitely extinguished by the flood of sycophantic, vitriolic, and deceptive rhetoric emanating from the Republican National Convention. The supreme sycophant was the former mayor of New York, Rudolph Giuliani who on the first day of the convention gave the kind of speech one normally associates with regimes that promote the cult of the Great Leader. Besides comparing Bush to Abraham Lincoln and Winston Churchill, he recounted an improbable story about how on 9/11, in the midst of chaos, just after the attack on the World Trade Center, `without really thinking, based on just emotion, spontaneous, I grabbed the arm of then Police Commissioner Bernard Kerik and I said to him, `Bernie, thank God George Bush is our President.'” And, for good measure, he added, `President George W. Bush has already earned a place in history as a great American president. . . . President Bush is the leader we need for the next four years because he can see beyond just today and tomorrow. He can see into the future.”
The second day of the Republican National Convention featured Laura Bush and Arnold Schwarzenegger. The first lady's eulogy was meant to show that the steadfast and unwavering Great Leader is also a `loving man with a big heart.” Schwarzenegger was entrusted with the task of extolling the `big heart” of the Republican Party. Listening to the Governor of California one had to wonder whether one was experiencing a hallucination. Describing himself as an immigrant, he wanted to reassure `my fellow immigrants” that in the United States, `we can respectfully disagree and still be patriotic, still be American, and still be a good Republican.” Of course, the upper echelons of the Party and of the administration would disagree; but the dogmatists and enforcers of conformity, such House majority leader, Tom DeLay (known as `the hammer”), attorney general John Ashcroft, and the super-hawk secretary of defense Donald Rumsfeld, were nowhere to be seen while the convention was being televised. As he delivered his speech, Schwarzenegger personified the duplicity of the Republican Party which during the past four years has veered so far to the right and has become so doctrinaire that its leaders have been working hard to unseat even Republican congressmen and senators deemed too moderate. (The battle for political survival that Senator Arlen Spector of Pennsylvania had to wage earlier this year against a hard-line conservative from his own Party, is a case in point.) Four years ago, George Bush portrayed himself as a `compassionate conservative”, and a `uniter not a divider”-and, despite all evidence to the contrary, there were enough credulous voters to squeeze him into the White House. No sooner had he assumed power than he started to act as if he had received a huge mandate; his electoral victory in 2000 was minimal at best, but he has pursued an uncompromisingly conservative agenda that can only be described as maximalist. One need only look at the extreme right-wing ideologues that Bush has been appointing to the federal judiciary. The actions of the Bush administration and of the Republican majority in Congress have left the country more bitterly divided than it has been at any time since the early 1970s. One could produce a whole litany of examples to refute Schwarzenegger's portrayal of the Republican Party as tolerant, inclusive, and moderate. But that would be superfluous, since on the third day of the convention the main speakers-Senator Zell Miller (an old Southern Democrat and former governor of Georgia who claims to be disillusioned with his party) and Dick Cheney-delivered a most stunning display of meanness, intolerance, mendacity, and venomous hate.
Zell Miller started his rabid attack on Kerry by suggesting that running against the president in a time of war is in itself an unpatriotic act: `Now, while young Americans are dying in the sands of Iraq and the mountains of Afghanistan, our nation is being torn apart and made weaker because of the Democrat's manic obsession to bring down our Commander-in- Chief.” After scorning the Democrats' supposed lack of patriotism, Miller went on to list all the weapons systems that Kerry purportedly voted to discontinue; if Miller is to be believed, Kerry would like to completely disarm the U.S, military. (It turns out that Dick Cheney wanted to discontinue or cut back on many of the same weapons systems when he served as secretary of defense in the administration of Bush the father.) And to cap it all, Miller asserted that Kerry would even surrender U.S. sovereignty to the United Nations and to France: `Senator Kerry has made it clear that he would use military force only if approved by the United Nations. Kerry would let Paris decide when America needs defending.” Zell Miller's accusations were so preposterous, one couldn't help but wonder whether he had lost his mind. It is not, however, Zell Miller's mental sanity that should cause concern; what's truly worrisome is that Miller's demagoguery was cheered exuberantly by the Republican faithful. What greater indictment of U.S. democracy than the fact that instead of causing revulsion-or, at the very least, embarrassment-a disgraceful speech like Miller's draws more voters towards George Bush?
Dick Cheney's address to the convention followed Miller's and was just as reckless and dishonest. Referring to Kerry's criticism of the Bush administration's unilateralist foreign policy and its rush to war against Iraq, Cheney said: `Senator Kerry denounces American action when other countries don't approve -- as if the whole object of our foreign policy were to please a few persistent critics. In fact, in the global war on terror, as in Afghanistan and Iraq, President Bush has brought many allies to our side. But as the President has made very clear, there is a difference between leading a coalition of many, and submitting to the objections of a few. George W. Bush will never seek a permission slip to defend the American people.” It is especially noteworthy that apart from grossly distorting Kerry's position, Cheney falsely conflated the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq-despite the categorical assertion in The 9/11 Commission Report (New York: Norton, 2004) that there exists no evidence `indicating that Iraq cooperated with al Qaeda in developing or carrying out any attacks against the United States” (p. 66).
The Bush campaign is a juggernaut that tramples over facts, and provides the masses with fantastical version of reality. Here is a brief extract from the rosy picture Bush painted in his convention speech (in which he, too, sought to mislead his audience by associating Iraq with the 9/11 attacks):
we are working to advance liberty in the broader Middle East, because freedom will bring a future of hope and the peace we all want. . . . Our strategy is succeeding . . . We have led, many have joined, and America and the world are safer. This progress involved careful diplomacy, clear moral purpose and some tough decisions. And the toughest came on Iraq. We knew Saddam Hussein's record of aggression and support for terror. We knew his long history of pursuing, even using, weapons of mass destruction. And we know that September the 11th requires our country to think differently. We must, and we will, confront threats to America before it is too late. . . . Because we acted to defend our country, the murderous regimes of Saddam Hussein and the Taliban are history, more than 50 million people have been liberated, and democracy is coming to the broader Middle East. . . . Despite ongoing acts of violence, Iraq now has a strong prime minister, a national council, and national elections are scheduled for January. 
When he spoke these words on 2 September at the Republican convention in New York, George Bush was consciously and deliberately deceiving the nation. It is now known that in late July, George Bush received a secret National Intelligence Estimate which described the situation in Iraq as very bleak. According to the report, stability in Iraq, if achieved, would be fragile and could very well be shattered by a civil war. (The existence of this National intelligence estimate was reported in the New York Times of 16 September.)
By the time the Republican National Convention was over, John Kerry realized that his effort to stick to the `high road' had been counterproductive. Less than hour after Bush finished speaking in New York, Kerry launched a new, combative campaign strategy. Addressing a crowd of about 15,000 people in Springfield, Ohio (and whoever else happened to be watching cable TV news channels at midnight) he bristled with anger: "I'm not going to have my commitment to defend this country questioned by those who refused to serve when they could have and by those who have misled the nation into Iraq." He went further:
Let me tell you what I think makes someone unfit for duty, Misleading our nation into war in Iraq makes you unfit to lead this nation. Doing nothing while this nation loses millions of jobs makes you unfit to lead this nation. Letting 45 million Americans go without health care makes you unfit to lead this nation. Letting the Saudi royal family control our energy costs makes you unfit to lead this nation. Handing out billions in government contracts without a bid to Halliburton while you're still on their payroll makes you unfit.
According to the opinion polls, the carefully scripted demagoguery of the Republican National Convention had the desired effect-the Newsweek and Time polls showed Bush with a10 point lead over Kerry. It does not mean that everyone was fooled or failed to notice the corrosive effect of the orgy of mendacity and vilification that took place in New York between 30 August and 2 September. The political analyst William Saletan of Slate (2 September 2004) pointed out that `the election is becoming a referendum on democracy.” In a similar vein, the Washington Post columnist, E. J. Dionne Jr,. wrote, à propos of the convention (3 September 2004): `If reelecting the president requires leaving the country more broken and more divided along party lines than it already is, we now know this is a price those in power are happy to pay.” Unfortunately, however, informed opinion and popular sentiment are not the same thing.
It remains to be seen whether Kerry's new strategy will prove effective. He has restructured his campaign organization, bringing in a number of former Clinton aides; and, in his speeches around the country, he has been focussing his listeners' attention on the failures of the Bush administration. For months, Bush and Cheney have been able to deflect criticism by relentlessly questioning Kerry's reliability, consistence, honesty, and leadership qualities. In order to keep Kerry on the defensive they have resorted to scare-mongering of the most shameless and irresponsible sort. For example, here is what Cheney said at a campaign rally in Iowa on 7 September; "It's absolutely essential that eight weeks from today, on November 2, we make the right choice. Because if we make the wrong choice, then the danger is that we'll get hit again, that we'll be hit in a way that will be devastating from the standpoint of the United States.” If these were normal times, one would expect such recklessness to backfire. But these are not ordinary times; if they were, the country would be demanding that Bush explain why nobody has taken responsibility for the thousand and one things that have gone abominably wrong in Afghanistan and Iraq; why, in a prosperous country, tens of millions of people have no health insurance; how the enormous budget deficit is going to be reduced; when the persistent failures of the educational system will be remedied.
These are the kinds of questions that Kerry is now asking aggressively as he tries to reverse the momentum of the campaign by demanding that George Bush be held accountable for his many errors and failures. Bush is always providing `excuses” and shirking responsibility, Kerry said in a harshly critical speech he delivered in Michigan on 14 September. Bush, Kerry observed, `blames everybody but himself and his administration for America's economic problems.” Because of Bush's unjust fiscal policies, Kerry added, `a fireman who works overtime to save money and pay for his kid to go to school actually pays a higher tax rate than a billionaire who just inherited a fortune.” On 16 September, Kerry's attack on the president got even fiercer. In a formal speech to the National Guard Association in Las Vegas, Kerry excoriated Bush for misleading the nation about the current situation in Iraq:
[The president] did not tell you that with each passing day, we're seeing more chaos, more violence, more indiscriminate killings. He did not tell you that with each passing week, our enemies are getting bolder - that Pentagon officials report that entire regions of Iraq are now in the hands of terrorists and extremists. He did not tell you that with each passing month, stability and security seem farther and farther away... You deserve a president who will not play politics with national security, who will not ignore his own intelligence, while living in a fantasy world of spin, and who will give the American people the truth about the challenge our brave men and women face on the front lines.
Kerry is now putting Bush's character and record under the microscope, but there is no guarantee that the electorate will bother to look through the lens. The public is easily distracted and the news media devote more time to sensational events than to substantive issues. As the Kerry campaign seemed to be hitting its stride in mid-September, the CBS network broadcast a story in which it claimed to have found documents proving that when he served in the National Guard Bush disobeyed orders and received preferential treatment. It turned out that the documents might have been forged. For days and days the debate about the authenticity of the documents and the motives of those who reported on them overshadowed most other news. Even as the violence in Iraq was spinning out of control, most of the public's attention was focussed on the minutiae of the suspect documents.
Perhaps the formal debates between the candidates that have yet to take place will move this presidential campaign out of the mire in which it is stuck. That is not to say one should expect any original ideas to be set forth; but, maybe, the lies and the hatred will be set aside for a while and the electorate will be induced to ask whether the U.S.-and the rest of the world, for that matter-is more secure, more just, and more prosperous than it was four years ago. Sober reflection, if such a thing were possible in the present political climate, might lead voters to support Kerry even if they don't admire him or even agree with him. A group of intellectuals and political activists-among them Noam Chomsky, Cornel West, Howard Zinn, Barbara Ehrenreich-who supported Ralph Nader in 2000, put it this way in a statement they issued on 14 September: `For people seeking progressive social change in the United States, removing George W. Bush from office should be the top priority in the 2004 presidential election” (see, www.vote2stopbush.com).