Does Paul’s antiwar stand matter?  Well, probably anyone concerned about America’s role in the world ought to at least watch his ad – it’s that good, particularly at a time when hardly anyone else is being heard on the topic.  And we just might want to ask ourselves how it has come to pass that a Republican presidential candidate is putting something like that out there and we’re not.  At the very least we shouldn’t pretend that the Ron Paul antiwar phenomenon isn’t happening simply because we don’t like the man’s stand on other things.

Really, this whole thing shouldn’t be that confusing to us in the first place.  Since we don’t have the tightly disciplined parties found in some other countries, this short of crossover phenomenon is a somewhat regular feature of American politics.  During the Vietnam War, for instance, liberal California Republican Congressman Pete McCloskey famously challenged his party’s sitting president, Richard Nixon, on the war issue in the 1972 primaries.  Of course, what’s set current antiwar activists in a tizzy about Paul is that he ain’t no liberal.

Still, the intensity of the debate over whether he is ultimately, on balance, a good guy or a bad guy seems somewhat misplaced, given how little it has to do with any likely set of events.   For one thing, few, if any, of those engaged in the argument are going to ever find themselves standing in a voting booth holding a primary ballot that includes Ron Paul’s name.  And so far as November goes, let’s face it – the Republican Party isn’t going to nominate him.

Better, perhaps, to direct this passion to analyzing how we might conceivably steal his thunder on the war issue.  For again, like it or not, the man has demonstrated an ability to attract political support among independents and young voters.  He drew 48 percent of the entire under-thirty vote in the Iowa Republican caucuses and 47 percent in the New Hampshire primary; and led with 44 percent of independents in New Hampshire and 32 percent in Iowa.  He also held a 34 percent plurality of first time participants in Iowa and was the top vote getter among those making less than $50,000, with 31 percent in both states.  He actually polled better among self described “moderates” than among those calling themselves “very conservative” – in Iowa by a factor of two to one.

We don’t want to make too much out of numbers from Republican voters, certainly, yet it’s hard to ignore those demographics.   And there seems little doubt that Paul’s anti-imperialist stance constitutes a very significant aspect of his appeal.  Unquestionably, Paul’s Republicanism has given him greater leeway on foreign policy than a Democrat or an independent from the Left might have.  It’s the Nixon-goes-to-China, Clinton-ends-welfare-as-we-know-it syndrome.  Even the Republicans who hate him don’t call him an “un-American” or a “terrorist sympathizer” – not yet, anyhow.

It’s also not the case that he’s saying things that we haven’t said.  What’s important though, is that he’s delivering that message to people and places that haven’t heard it before. What is ultimately so impressive about Paul’s Chinese in Texas ad is the empathy at its core.  Americans would resist foreign invaders, it argues, just as others do when it’s the Americans who are the foreign invaders.  Why, one might even conclude that the lives of people in strange countries are just as valuable as those of Americans!

(A Guardian article denouncing “Ron Paul’s useful idiots on the left” provides a useful contrast, as author Megan Carpentier berates said “idiots” for thinking that “people whose lives, safety, livelihoods and health depend on them [policies and programs opposed by Paul] should accept that they are trading their concerns for, say, the lives of Muslim children killed by bombs in Afghanistan” – the idea that the latter could approach the former in importance being so obviously ridiculous as to require no further comment.)

Who could have imagined that the best mass market educational material on American foreign policy would seen mostly by Republicans?  Perhaps if some of the vehemence currently displayed in rendering an overall judgement on Paul were redirected toward figuring out what we could do to change that situation, we just might have an antiwar movement worthy of the name.

Certainly, so far as domestic economic policy goes, Paul holds about zero appeal – he doesn’t just favor cutbacks in Social Security and Medicare, but complete abolition of the programs. Basically a utopian capitalist, Paul presumably doesn’t even hold an “enlightened capitalist” position that might acknowledge that New Deal and Great Society programs may have forestalled a return to Great Depression-era conditions by directing resources to the lower rungs on the economic ladder. So, no matter how critical we might be of the shortcomings of Obama’s health insurance plan or his defense of Social Security, there’s no question that his policies are far superior to Paul’s in all of this.

And that would be that, except for one thing – the rest of the world. Rejecting equally the welfare and the warfare state, Paul categorizes current American foreign policy as “delusional” and, in that regard, he is far superior to a President who appears to have embraced war as a permanent condition of American life, to be conducted on a worldwide basis, with targets that may now even include American citizens.

What are we make of a split like this? If we were we speaking in electoral terms, the answer might be simple: “It’s the economy, stupid;” you don’t win elections on foreign policy – at least not when there’s no military draft. But for the purposes of our political thought experiment, let’s not confuse what we think would work with what we think is right. The question here is whether one of these two deeply flawed political profiles is somehow better, or at least not as bad as the other. This could be a much more difficult calculation.

Let’s consider the Afghanistan War – something not likely to be much of an issue in the campaign that will actually transpire next year. Twice as many American troops have now died there under Obama’s watch as during the Bush years (1153 of the 1728 total.) And with talk of keeping 25,000 soldiers there until 2024, can any but the hardest core Obama zealot really believe that he’s working on any kind of plan other than not being the president who “lost Afghanistan”? For a point of reference, we had “only” 25,000 troops there in 2007. So under the Obama Plan, America’s Ten Years War will become its Twenty Years War. Clear point to Ron Paul on this one.

And let’s look at some much larger numbers – like the cost of this war. In its recommendations to the Joint Select Committee on Deficit Reduction, the Congressional Progressive Caucus estimates the savings from “a responsible end to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan” at $1.6 trillion. Where will the money come from to continue this military adventure from one decade to the next as Obama apparently hopes to do? Probably not Wall Street.

We’re still just talking about the tip of the iceberg, though. Obama appears to have drunk the military establishment’s Kool Aid in a single gulp. With nary a murmur about the absurdity of continuing to defend Western Europe from the Soviet Union, twenty years after that country has ceased to exist, the President has accepted the necessity for seven hundred or so foreign military bases. As for the idea of his administration being in some way “transformational,” as some once hoped, so far as foreign policy goes, the only transformation he’ll be remembered for is the transition to drone warfare.

Which is worse, then – Paul’s domestic policy or Obama’s foreign policy? So far as their effect on Americans goes, there are arguments to be made either way. But, again, there’s the rest of the world. Estimates of civilian deaths caused by U.S. led operations in Afghanistan run from 10-30,000. These numbers, of course, carry little weight in any domestic American political calculation since the friends and relatives of these unfortunates – collateral damage, as we call civilian casualties when they’re not Americans – cannot vote or even be heard in this country. But one might argue that they hold greater moral weight for that very reason. For all that we may suffer under our government’s misguided domestic policies, the fact is that we have some say in them. Limitations and imperfections in our democratic system notwithstanding, we could vote the people responsible for them out of office, but, for a variety of reasons, we have not done so. Those who suffer under our misguided foreign policy, however, do not have that power – not even in theory.

For better or worse, any electoral match-up that we are actually likely to see next year will pose no such dilemma. The Republican candidate will almost certainly be calling for both more war and more domestic cutbacks than Obama, so the considerations raised by an Obama-Paul match up will remain just abstract questions. We’ll be “lucky” that way.

Nevertheless, if there is ever to be a paradigm shift in American politics of the sort that the Occupy movement hints at; if we are ever to be able to make common cause with the wider range of people necessary to effect real change, then it will probably require that we think all of this through and see our supposed friends with as clear eyes as we see our supposed enemies.

Part III

Why is it so hard to understand the need for a primary challenge to Barack Obama?  When Jesse Jackson ran in the 1988 presidential primaries, pretty much everybody understood the point.  No, he wasn’t going to get elected president – or even win the nomination, but the reasons for a primary campaign don’t end there.  What Jackson would do was say what needed to be said.  He would get ideas shared by a lot of people onto the front page for the first time in a long time, maybe ever.  He would point out the nation’s shortcomings on the domestic front as well as our excesses on our many foreign fronts.  People would talk to each other about them; some would organize.  Other candidates might even have to address some of this for once.  As he used to put it, he would “keep hope alive.”

The Obama “Hope” posters notwithstanding, it seems obvious that Jackson’s “hope” is very much in need of life support these days.  Even those convinced that the President has fought the good fight, that in his heart he remains a man of peace, and that our problems are all due to Republicans and Blue Dog Democrats, must certainly recognize the still growing gap between rich and poor, as well as the fact that we currently bomb more countries than in the Bush years.  Whatever else may be the case, by now it seems clear that just being the change we wish to see doesn’t cut it as political strategy.  We need government committed to making the change we wish to see.  And for that to happen, at the least, we need someone spelling out the nature of that  change – on the national level, much as Jesse Jackson once did.

The surface arguments against challenging Obama are the fears that it would somehow weaken him and might alienate Black America, the group that formed the base of Jackson’s campaign.  The reluctance to promote an alternative vision seems to run even deeper, though, for the fact is that the Jackson candidacy was an anomaly.  A look back at the last two presidential campaigns – when there was no Democratic incumbent – may provide a more typical example of the American Left’s unwillingness to support candidates aspiring to promote its ideas.

When the Republicans lost control of Congress in 2006, the most widely cited cause was the Bush Administration’s war in Iraq.  So when the Democratic takeover produced virtually no impact on that war, it seemed inevitable that Iraq become the defining issue of the 2008 presidential race.  And yet primary voters did not back the serious antiwar candidates who were available, with the result that by Super Tuesday, the only remaining Democratic presidential aspirant pledged to complete troop withdrawal was Mike Gravel, the former Alaska Senator and prominent Vietnam War opponent, whose exceedingly modest campaign never netted so much as a half of one percent of the vote in any primary or caucus.Before the race was over, Gravel would actually bolt the Democratic Party entirely and join the Libertarians.

Meanwhile, the small “l” libertarian Republican Texas Congressman Ron Paul mounted the most unlikely, and most successful antiwar candidacy of the entire presidential season, although by Super Tuesday it too had become quite marginal.  The later stages of the race were then dominated by Democrats Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama – who were not committed to removing all American troops from Iraq during the four-year term that they sought – and Republican John McCain – who did not appear committed to removing them during the twenty-first century.  If anti-Iraq War sentiment had once been a defining electoral force, it was not any longer.  And along with the antiwar movement went any notion that a significant electoral left existed in America in 2008.  We might say it committed suicide.

Some thought any sense of urgency about the Iraq War left the Democratic race with the departure of John Edwards.  As a U.S. Senator, Edwards had voted to authorize the war, just as Clinton had; and also voted to fund it, as both Clinton and Obama had.  As a presidential candidate, however, he had tried to carve out some kind of acceptable antiwar campaign position, that is to say, to the left of the other well funded candidates, but not too far to their left.  Media critic Norman Solomon’s generous interpretation was that Edwards’ position on the war was “evolving,” once calling him “the most improved presidential candidate of 2007.”  And, in fact, by the time Edwards withdrew, he was calling for the removal of all combat troops within a year.  In many respects he was the 2008 version of Howard Dean, the former Vermont Governor deemed the “electable” antiwar candidate four years earlier.  Neither proved either as antiwar or as electable as most supporters wished, however.

The antiwar candidate from whom many Dean and Edwards backers averted their vision was Ohio Congressman Dennis Kucinich. In 2004, his supporters used to say that Kucinich actually was the candidate many people thought Dean to be.  Both had opposed the Iraq War at the start, but where Kucinich continued to call for complete U.S. troop withdrawal in ninety days, Dean grew vague on the question.  Similarly, up until the day he withdrew from the 2008 race, Edwards still envisioned 5,000 troops guarding the U.S. Embassy in Iraq at the end of his projected first White House term, a possibility that only made sense in the context of an ongoing military occupation.

Edwards’ candidacy met pretty much the same fate as Dean’s: premised upon their supposed electability, both quickly melted away once that premise proved chimerical – unlike the issues-based Kucinich campaign which chugged on through the entire 2004 primary season.  In 2008, however, Kucinich found himself shut out of network television debates before the first votes were even cast in the Iowa caucuses.  (The networks were likely only too happy to do this, of course, but were able to justify his exclusion with polls showing antiwar voters not supporting antiwar candidates.)  2008 proved less a reprise of his prior campaign than of the 1992 effort of Larry Agran, the once and future mayor of Irvine, California, who ran on a platform similar to the then-recent Jesse Jackson candidacies, but was deemed too obscure to participate in the presidential debates.

Kucinich’s withdrawal from the race ended what slim chance remained for any presidential primary discussion, not only of immediate withdrawal from Iraq, but of a Canadian-style single payer health care plan, a serious critique of free trade policies, and a range of other issues.  Gravel remained, true, but while his positions (quite close to Kucinich’s, with the exception of a flat tax plan) were quite serious, his fundraising was not.  Where the less than $4 million Kucinich had raised by the end of 2007 was quite insubstantial compared to Clinton’s $115 million and Obama’s $102 million, it was nonetheless an order of magnitude larger than Gravel’s $379,795.  Raising less than Jim Gilmore (you’ll have to look that one up) had in pursuit of the Republican nomination, Gravel’s campaign was quite simply unknown to the overwhelming majority of the electorate.

Much of Kucinich’s 2008 difficulty undoubtedly stemmed from the fact that while his wire-to-wire 2004 campaign had arguably been the most significant left wing Democratic presidential candidacy since Jesse Jackson’s 1988 run, that wasn’t saying all that much.  Kucinich had netted but 67 delegates compared to the nearly 400 Jackson won in his first try in 1984.  So where Jackson’s supporters felt they had something to build on and went on to win over 1,200 delegates the second time out, many of Kucinich’s no doubt began looking elsewhere after the first race.
The disparagement Kucinich’s candidacy encountered from the right and center was only to be expected – and no doubt would have been far more vociferous had they thought there was any need to take him more seriously.

The criticism from the left probably deserves greater scrutiny, though.  A widely cited article on the Edwards campaign by Bill Fletcher, Executive Editor of The Black Commentator, argued that both Edwards and Kucinich “fell prey to the historic ‘white populist error.’ What is this error, you ask?” he wrote, “Simply put, it is the idea that unity will magically appear by building a campaign that attacks poverty and corporate abuse, supports unions and focuses on the challenges facing the working class, BUT IGNORES RACE AND GENDER.” (Capitals in original).  Given that Kucinich actually supported reparations for slavery, this seems less a seriously considered critique than a rote add-on to an article about Edwards, particularly in light of Fletcher’s later role as a leader of “Progressives for Obama,” despite obvious Obama’s failure to live up to the standards Fletcher previously enunciated. (Fletcher currently opposes a primary challenge to Obama on the grounds that it would alienate black voters – and the argument for a black challenger to Obama is certainly worth considering.)

This was not the typical left wing critique of Kucinich, though, and one wonders whether its wide circulation might have had something to do with its offering white leftists an out from having to do anything for better candidates with lesser prospects.  Many actually seemed to feel that Kucinich was too good on the issues.  Supporters of more “mainstream” candidates routinely acknowledged that he was better on Iraq or health care than the candidate they actually backed, but felt the country somehow wasn’t ready for that.  Certainly the Pentagon and the insurance industry weren’t, anyhow.  So why even try?

It’s true that when Jackson ran not everyone immediately got the point – mainstream political commentators continually asked, “What does Jesse want?” The real question, though, was what Jackson’s voters wanted.  Why did they break with the conventional wisdom that you “threw away” your vote when you backed someone you didn’t think had much chance of becoming the eventual nominee?  For some, of course, the main reason was that he was a black candidate who brought that community’s concerns to the attention of a wider audience.  For others, though, it was his platform that included creating a Works Progress Administration-style program to rebuild America’s infrastructure; a fifteen percent Department of Defense budget cut; reparations to descendants of slaves; a single-payer system of universal health care; increased federal funding for public education; free community college for all; and reversing tax cuts for the richest Americans and earmarking the revenue for social welfare programs.  In other words, it was a platform of the left, a platform very much like that of Dennis Kucinich.

Some of Jackson’s ideas – like the Canadian-style health care system – had never received front page treatment before.  Among other things, keeping hope alive meant keeping those ideas in the political debate.  But this was not to be.  When Jackson opted against a third try in 1992, those ideas were no longer to be found in the presidential discussion, Larry Agron’s efforts notwithstanding.  Four years later, despite widespread discontent over his tack to the right, no significant Democrat challenged Bill Clinton’s re-election.  And by 2000, the presidential primaries showed no trace at all of the ideas that had motivated Jackson’s base twelve years earlier – even with no incumbent in the race.
There have now been five Democratic presidential nominating conventions since Jesse Jackson’s last run.  In those gatherings, the sum total of delegates elected to represent a candidate with a platform similar to Jackson’s is the 67 Kucinich delegates elected in 2004.  Did those ideas disappear?  Obviously not.  Some, like a single payer health care system have steadily gained support, to the point where one state, Vermont, has started on the path of implementation.  What has disappeared, however, is the American Left’s will to take itself seriously – and with it any need for the rest of the nation to do so either.

Right now, pollsters for Rasmussen Reports tell us that 70% of Democrats support immediate withdrawal from Afghanistan, a position that, as of the moment, will be represented only in the Republican Primaries (by not one, but two candidates – Ron Paul and former New Mexico Governor Gary Johnson.)  Rasmussen (whose polls are generally considered skewed to the right) also reports 39% of all voters (compared to 32% in 2009 Rasmussen poll) supporting a single-payer health care system along the lines of the bill recently re-filed by Senator Bernie Sanders.   Right now, that position would have no supporters in either set of primaries.

The Obama candidacy was supposed to be all about energizing and activating America’s youth.  Well, many of those once energized and activated are now alienated.  And what are they told today?  Be quiet.  Don’t go jeopardizing what we’ve got.  Not the wisest course, even for the Obama supporters, me thinks.

It may well be true that those who heard what Obama actually said during the 2008 campaign – as opposed to what they wanted to hear him say – don’t have all that much reason to be disillusioned with his performance.  But for a very large number of his voters it was not like that.  They thought that a community organizer would try to bring about real change.  They didn’t expect him to give the insurance industry half the loaf before the health care fight even began.  They thought he only said that he would expand the Afghanistan War and bring it to Pakistan because he had to say things like that to defuse the right.  They shouldn’t have thought these things, but they did.  Hey, if the Nobel Peace Prize Committee could fool itself, why shouldn’t the average American voter?  If anything, Obama’s backers might welcome a primary challenge as a way for him to try to restate his case and revitalize his base.  If he’s got something to say for his actions – and inactions – by all means, let him say it.  If nothing else, the man does give a good speech.

To some, a primary challenge is a diversion from what we really need to be doing – some type of “organizing” to provide a base for the change that we wish Obama really wanted to effect.  We need to become better, more active citizens – the argument goes – committed to “making” him do the right thing – as in that story about FDR once telling someone or other to “make me do it.”  Certainly we could actually benefit from more activism on all levels, but to argue that community or labor organizing can substitute for electoral activity is, well, a-political – in the real-world sense of politics.

The sad fact is that, since the Jackson campaigns, the American Left has largely opted out of the biggest political game in the land – the race for the White House, the national discussion that comes only every fourth year.  Right now, Obama faces a reelection campaign in which he will have to answer to no one to his left.  Oh, there will no doubt be some third party challenge or other, but few of even Obama’s harshest critics will want to run the risk of inadvertently facilitating a Republican take over of the White House.  One might even consider Obama guilty of an impeachable offense – the continued bombing Libya in violation of the War Powers Act – or an indictable offense (were the International Criminal Court to hold the U.S. to the same standards as militarily weaker nations) – the drone bombing campaigns in Pakistan and Yemen – and still recognize that worse is possible.   After all, we had it for the previous eight years.

But the need for careful action is not an excuse for inaction.  Do we really mean to tell every new young voter disillusioned with our never-ending state of war that the only place to go is to Ron Paul and the libertarians?  Do we mean to tell all the budding activists outraged at seeing the poor stay poor and the rich get richer, that there’s no room for that discussion in the presidential election process?

To commit to a primary race against Obama requires a vision.  A vision, first, of a 2012 nominating convention with a bloc of delegates committed to ending the corporate warfare state, and saying so.  And a vision of future conventions with blocs of delegates of the left large enough to make a difference in the policies of the eventual nominee.  All of this may seem like quite a stretch, given how lifeless the presidential nomination process has become.  It requires hope – not the passive kind where we keep our mouths shut, cross our fingers and hope that Obama will bend our way, but active hope.

Jesse Jackson was on to something.  Let’s find a candidate.  Let’s talk to people.  Let’s send some delegates to Charlotte, North Carolina next year.  Let’s make the president answer to us.  We may not be able to “make him do” the things we want, but I think we’d at least be heading in the right direction.

As the 2012 presidential campaign warms up, increased calls for another shot at a “third party” presidential candidacy are inevitable. After all, the party holding the White House has switched and yet America’s disparity of wealth and income appears to grow unchecked; military spending continues on a pace nearly matching that of the entire rest of the planet put together; and the pointless, and increasingly obviously unwinnable war in Afghanistan that started with George Bush will pass the ten year mark bigger than ever – with Barack Obama at the helm.

Why not then just start afresh with a new party, like people in other countries do when they don’t like the parties they’ve got? Well, the simple answer is because parties can function quite differently in various situations. And we can’t consider an approach toward the current situation truly political – as opposed to philosophical – unless it measures the system in which it operates. So, while a third party may intuitively seem to be the “really radical” way to go, if it doesn’t work well in our system, it’s not. Outrage, however justified, is never a substitute for strategy.

The Tea Partiers got nothing on these ladies

Were we in Germany, for example, we’d be dealing with political parties with very different characteristics, operating under very different rules. So, when some on the German left found the politics of the Social Democratic Party disappointing, inadequate, or maybe not even left wing at all, they started a new party; first the Green Party and more recently the Left Party. These moves were quite logical within a system that allows parties to combine their respective parliamentary delegations to form a coalition government when no one of them has a majority – as is usually the case. A new party might realistically hope, then, to first become a junior coalition partner – and have some of its program adopted – and later even become the larger party. All of this can be done without great worry that a vote for the new party might inadvertently facilitate the worst possible outcome, namely a Prime Minister from the party whose policies the new party’s voters favor the least (in this case, probably the Christian Democrats.)

An American presidential election unfortunately offers no such assurance. There are no provisions for coalition governments. The White House goes to the winner of the vote of the Electoral College, the makeup of which is determined by pluralities of popular votes in the various states. Come in first in the state and get all of its electoral votes, even if you don’t have a majority. (Maine and Nebraska distribute their Electoral Votes on a Congressional District rather than statewide basis.) All of which means that in the U.S. a “third party” vote can unintenionally facilitate the election of a President from the least-liked party – probably the Republicans in the case of a “third party” of the left. Where German (or French or Italian) “third party” voters have reasonable assurance that their vote will actually increase the prospect of blocking the least desired electoral outcome, American “third party” voters do not. Ignore that fact and you might as well be playing American football without a helmet.

NO DIFFERENCE?

Are there circumstances that might outweigh these considerations? Well, there could be. The most common argument for not worrying too much about whether “third party” efforts might result in a Republican president is that there’s no essential difference between the Republicans and the Democrats. Let’s look.

So far as domestic politics go, the stark profile that Republicans are currently presenting in the U.S. House of Representatives and various state capitals, most famously Madison, Wisconsin, would seem to make this argument a fairly difficult one to press at the moment. When it comes to labor rights, for instance, Democrats may disappoint, but Republicans destroy – not a trivial distinction. While Democrats may fail to press forward aggressively on women’s rights, Republicans defund Planned Parenthood. And so on.

Since my goal is analysis rather than rhetoric, I don’t want to ignore the fact that Massachusetts’ Democratic controlled House of Representatives has since attempted to match the anti-union efforts of their Republican in Wisconsin.  There’s no question but that the Democrats can make it very hard to defend them.  But no matter how many times we’re moved to say, “They’re almost as bad as the Republicans,” the “almost” does matter.

And then there is the matter of day-to-day the consequences of appointments to bodies such as the Supreme Court and the National Labor Relations Board, an area where there may be the broadest agreement that there is a real difference between the effects of electing one of the “major” parties or the other.

On the foreign policy side, the argument for the rough equivalence of the parties can be a lot stronger though. For instance, the recent U.S. veto of a U.N. Security Council resolution that declared Israeli West Bank settlement illegal came as no big surprise since Democratic and Republican administrations have both done such things for decades. And not only is Obama’s pursuit of the Afghanistan War more aggressive than Bush’s – as promised – but he has also authorized American bombing in Pakistan, Yemen and Libya, the latter serving as a reminder of the Democrats’ embrace of the “humanitarian” military intervention during the Clinton Administration.

And yet, there has been a difference – certainly on the congressional level, anyhow. The invasion and occupation of Iraq, which stands out as the premier atrocity even in a decade of unceasing American military action, was initiated by a Republican president and opposed by most Democrats in the House of Representatives. And even when it’s been Obama initiating military action in Libya, it’s been Democrats who have been the most vigorous in calling him on his failure to consult Congress.

It also seems hard to argue that any Republican likely to replace Obama wouldn’t be even worse on foreign policy. For instance, while the Obama Administration’s pursuit of Wikileaks founder Julian Assange and its treatment of alleged leaker Bradley Manning certainly give us nothing to cheer about, consider the stance of presumed Republican presidential contender Mike Huckabee: “Whoever in our government leaked that information is guilty of treason, and I think anything less than execution is too kind a penalty.”

Candidate Newt Gingrich, who was for the Libya bombing before he was against it, believes “We certainly have to be prepared to use military force” to oust the government of Iran and in years past has called for legislation “that recognizes that we are entering World War III and serves notice that the United States will use all its resources to defeat our enemies – not accommodate, understand, or negotiate with them, but defeat them.”

Speaking of the possible development of a nuclear program in Iran, whose government he calls an “unalloyed evil,” former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney laments that “Unfortunately, for reasons that are unfathomable to me, our government has signaled that the military option is effectively off the table.”

Former Minnesota Governor Tim Pawlenty tells the President to “Stop apologizing for our country,” as “we undermine Israel, the U.K., Poland, the Czech Republic and Colombia, among other friends. Meanwhile, we appease Iran, Russia and adversaries in the Middle East, including Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood.”

Minnesota Congresswoman Michelle Bachman believes that if “we reject Israel, then there is a curse that comes into play.”

And, of course, Sarah Palin’s views are well known.

The Choice vs. The Echo?

In short, so far as foreign policy goes, while it might not be such an open and shut case as domestic policy, if you think it’s bad now … (There is one Republican presidential candidate who does differ from all of the above, however – Texas Representative Ron Paul. But Paul will not receive the nomination, in no small part because his sane views on foreign policy are so far out of tune with the bulk of his party. It will also constitute a tremendous failing on the part of antiwar forces within the Democratic Party if Paul and former New Mexico governor Gary Johnson should be the only candidates in either major party calling for an immediate end to the Afghanistan and Iraq wars and occupations.)

BUT STILL,

Still, some may argue that even if the Republicans are worse than the Democrats, the Democratic Party is nevertheless a corporate dominated entity that is an unworthy and/or unworkable vehicle for social change. While not wishing to discourage anyone from hurling righteous brickbats at the party’s current leadership in Congress and the White House, I think arguing that the “essence” of the Democratic Party somehow precludes our useful participation in also fails to take into account the actual structure of American political parties.

Where parties in many other countries are “disciplined,” in the sense that their elected representatives are expected to vote that party’s position, American parties famously are not. (The best source on this may well be the humourist Will Rogers, whose remarks on the topic included, “I’m not a member of any organized political party, I’m a Democrat!”) Apart from voting for the party’s candidate for Speaker or Majority Leader, it’s largely understood that American legislators will not be bound by any party strictures. Representatives like Dennis Kucinich or Barbara Lee may vote “off” from the majority of their party colleagues time and time again, yet they are in no way prevented from doing so. In a sense, the members of the House and Senate, dependent on their own fundraising devices as they largely are, could be seen as constituting 535 independent parties.

Likewise, presidents routinely govern without consulting the wishes of their party. Does anyone really think there is a Democratic Party structure telling Obama what to do? Or that Republican Party bosses directed Bush?

THINGS NEED TO GET WORSE?

And then you may also hear the argument that things need to get worse before they get better. So even if a third party candidacy did facilitate the election of a Republican who was the greater of two evils, it might have the effect of waking people up to what’s really going on. For instance, didn’t Wisconsin and the American labor movement come to life after Scott Walker was elected governor? Unfortunately, the most infamous formulation of this notion comes from Weimar-era Germany: “Nach Hitler uns” (After Hitler, us) – in other words, some on the German left thought once people saw how bad the right wing really was, they’d turn to them. You know how that worked out. And while nothing so dramatic may happen here, it seems that if there were anything much to that theory, you’d figure people would be pretty wide awake by now after their eight years of George Bush.

I’m no doubt short shifting a range of other arguments here, but the one additional that does come to mind is from people who say they just can’t bring themselves to vote for a Democrat because they would feel tainted by the very act. And ultimately you can’t argue with an individual’s feeling on that score – but that’s a personal statement and not a political act.

INSANITY?

Of course, there are those who simply find the notion of making big change within the Democratic Party a dreary prospect – a high school classmate responded to my argument for challenging Obama in the primaries by citing Einstein’s definition of insanity as doing the same thing over and over again and thinking you’re going to get a different result. A fair enough assessment of recent left wing Democratic Party primary efforts, I’ll concede. Unfortunately, it’s a spot-on critique of recent left wing third party campaigns as well.

This is not the place to rehash all of the elements that led up to the Supreme Court decision declaring George Bush the winner of the 2000 election, but it seems undeniable that the perceived effect of Ralph Nader’s candidacy upon the outcome caused many potential supporters to simply apply the Einstein dictum and pay little attention to his subsequent efforts – or those of any third party candidate.

The context of Nader’s 2000 candidacy may be worth recalling, though. The Democratic primaries that year produced the most soporific race to occur in a year absent a sitting Democratic president in a very long time: Al Gore against Bill Bradley. Anyone out there remember what they disagreed on? As a result, Nader’s effort produced enough buzz to prompt a bit of serious consideration of how one might utilize the Electoral College system for a kind of “tactical voting,” a concept unfamiliar here, but fairly well known in the United Kingdom.

Second past the post?

Although quite dissimilar overall, the British and American electoral systems do share the feature of not directly electing the head of state, but instead choosing those who do elect that person – Members of Parliament in the U.K. and Presidential Electors in the U.S. – and doing so by a simple plurality in each district. In the latter years of the last Conservative government, the fact that their votes had no impact outside of their own district led some U.K. voters to act very differently than they would if their votes were totaled nationally. Aided by the availability of reliable polling information, Labourites and Liberal Democrats frequently voted for whichever of the two parties appeared to have the better chance of defeating the Tory in their particular district. (The recent Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition has shelved such tactics for the time being, of course.)

Likewise, in the U.S., some proposed that if you liked Nader and you lived in New York where Gore was sure to win, or Idaho where Bush was sure to win, you should just go ahead and vote for Nader. But if you lived in a state where the outcome was not so clear like, say, Florida, you should vote for Gore because he would be better than Bush, even if he was far less than ideal. Websites for negotiating interstate Gore–Nader vote swapping even sprung up before the government shut them down – on grounds that would later fail to pass muster in federal court. But talk of utilizing the Electoral College system for progressive ends pretty much came to a halt when the 2000 Nader vote exceeded Bush’s margin of victory in Florida and New Hampshire and it hasn’t been revived since.

All of this is not fundamentally an argument against either Ralph Nader or “third parties” in general. So far as Nader goes, the only thing that really bothered me about his most recent candidacy is that his announcement provided an opportunity for people who I don’t think could carry his briefcase to denounce him for ruining their lives’ work.

So far as “third parties” go, there have been some obvious notable successes on the local level, particularly in non-partisan elections. In San Francisco, for instance, over the past decade, two Greens have won seats on the city’s Board of Supervisors, two on the School Board and one on the Community College Board, while Green Party member Matt Gonzalez came within five points of defeating Democrat Gavin Newsom for mayor. (Two of the city’s chartered Democratic Clubs even endorsed Gonzalez, prompting an unsuccessful drive to de-charter them that ultimately established the right of the Clubs to endorse freely in nonpartisan elections. Four of the five successful Greens, by the way, have since left the Party; three to become Democrats.)

And then there is the wholly remarkable case of Bernie Sanders, who has won election to the United States Senate as an independent, in the process achieving sufficient stature that it would be a Democratic opponent rather than Sanders who would be deemed the spoiler should a three way race result in the seat going to a Republican.

Significantly, however, since the time Sanders reached Congress he has never embraced a “third party” presidential campaign, standing back from the Nader candidacy even in 2000, when in the early stages it looked to have the potential to exceed ten percent of the popular vote and really put the Greens on the map.

To hell with Truman!

In the end, the 2000 Nader campaign actually played out quite similarly to Henry Wallace’s 1948 Progressive Party candidacy. Former Vice President Wallace, who would have become president following the death of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, had the 1944 convention not pushed him off the Democratic ticket in favor of Harry Truman, was likewise early on expected to garner at least ten percent of the vote in a four way race with the now-incumbent Truman, New York Republican Governor Tom Dewey and South Carolina Governor Strom Thurmond. The same dynamic as would develop fifty-two years later came into play, though, and fear of electing Dewey overrode lack of enthusiasm for Truman. Wallace’s vote sank to under three percent, just as Nader’s would.

In retrospect, if the 2000 election were considered a test for the American people on the use of the Electoral College, you’d have to say we flunked it. Hence, the growing popularity of the probably ultimately more desirable strategy of ditching the eighteenth century “College” entirely (which would, though, only intensify the danger of “third party” votes producing undesirable outcomes.)

Obviously nothing lasts forever and the current structure of the American political system won’t either. Still,  it took a civil war to effect the last major alteration in the political landscape – the rise of the Republican Party. Likewise, we probably won’t see the next realignment until a significant portion of one party’s members – elected officials included – are ready to jump ship en masse – a possibility that does not seem to be on the immediate horizon.

However, a serious backlash among President Obama’s true believers does seem unavoidable, particularly among those who voted for him because of who they wanted him to be rather than who he was. “Third parties” can be particularly appealing to the relatively newly radicalized, who often want to put as much distance as possible between themselves and what they have just rejected. For one thing, a bold new party venture sure can seem a lot more glamourous than slogging though Democratic Party primaries.

In the end though, all of us, old or new, have to ask ourselves the same questions about the effectiveness of our political choices. And knowing the rules of the political system is ultimately a lot more important than knowing the rules of a game because so much more is at stake.

ronaldreagan1981 RT @SFBoard "Trickle Down!" ...da' gipper is impressed!

There’s nothing really new about this approach.  Call it “supply side economics,”“trickle-down economics” or “Reaganomics,” the idea’s the same: Cut business taxes, America thrives, and the tax cuts pay for themselves in increased revenue.  When the theory proved to be poppycock as those revenues failed to materialize, fiscal conservatives like Ronald Reagan found themselves born-again as deficit spenders.

Walker’s cuts were only a drop in the bucket compared to Wisconsin’s anticipated two-year shortfall of nearly $3 billion, amounting to $117 million over two years, with just a million or two for the relocating companies.  But his backers hope they’re just the start – eight of the cuts Walker campaigned on (there were more) would cost an estimated $3.8 billion over the two year budget cycle.

Likewise, the estimated $22-57 million payroll tax exemption that Twitter has apparently successfully demanded as its price for staying in San Francisco for the next six years falls far short the city’s projected $380 million deficit.  And since the deal only applies to new hires, Twitter won’t actually pay less than it does today.  But here too, that won’t be the end of it.

Online game creator Zynga has already announced it wants the same deal; others, likely including online review company Yelp, will certainly follow.  And since it’s not allowed to fashion a tax break for the benefit of a single company, this one is crafted for an entire “community revitalization” zone.  Business owners in other parts of the city will obviously ask their Supervisors why they can’t get them one too.

And there is a darker side to this.  Ronald Reagan was accused of being many things, but original thinker was not one of them.  He may actually have believed in what his future running mate, George H. Bush, once called his “voodoo economics,” but not everyone is so naive.  Grover Norquist, President of Americans for Tax Reform, proclaims his desire to shrink government “down to the size where we can drown it in the bathtub.”  And a major tax break for a wealthy corporation in an industry that’s currently thriving is just how you start the shrinkage.

It’s not that there are no legitimate policy issues here.  The city is currently one of the few with a payroll tax and some would prefer to switch to taxing a company’s gross receipts.  (The city had a hybrid system in which a company was taxed either on its profits or gross receipts until the latter was eliminated in 2001 by a lawsuit filed by the city’s businesses, an outcome that cost the city $25 million annually.)  And Supervisor Ross Mirkarimi, who voted against the Twitter deal proposed a two-year moratorium on taxing stock options.  Instead, for the moment the city has opted to stick with the current system and give Twitter what it wants.

And let’s be clear here – this tax break is not focused on an industry or individuals struggling to make ends meet.  The New York Times recently pegged the hi tech industry’s average salary for computer science majors just out of college at $80,000, (with Google going as high as $90,000 to $105,000.)  Twitter itself is currently valued at $7 billion and hi tech employment in San Francisco is almost at its peak level.

The bill needs to go through one more reading, but with the Supervisors having voted 8-3 in its favor and Mayor Ed Lee leading the cheers, it seems certain to become law next week.  The question of whether the Board still had a “progressive” majority had been a open one until it firmly embraced a corporate tax agenda with this vote.  Still, as the city elects a mayor later this year and Lee has pledged to serve only the remainder of now-Lieutenant Governor Gavin Newsom’s term, the Twitter vote may emerge as a litmus issue in that race.

Those behind the Twitter deal no doubt think it will be cool to keep such a hip company in the city.  Perhaps they’re too young to remember Reaganomics; perhaps they’ve forgotten.  And no doubt, they’ll continue to denounce politicians in Sacramento and Washington, D.C. for cutting taxes on the rich and services for the rest of us.  But when it comes time to balance the budget in San Francisco, hip and cool won’t pay the bills.  Let’s not the rest of us forget that.  And for now, the city’s Board of Supervisors has been tried and found wanting.

In parts of Andhra Pradesh, Orissa, Bihar, Jharkhand, Chhattisgarh, West Bengal, Madhya Pradesh, Maharashtra, and Uttar Pradesh there are multiple threats to Indian democracy – extreme poverty, political disempowerment, unfair and exploitative economic relationships, lack of health care and education, sexual exploitation, lack of recognition of local rights to land and resources, and others.

In addition to these causes for Naxalite sympathy, support, and success in these areas, the actual violence of the conflict between Naxalites and the Indian state affects locals in many negative ways – killings, rapes, kidnappings, torture, hostage-takings, property stolen or destroyed, livelihoods ruined, villages displaced, families split in a state of near civil war. More recently, growing interest in these resource-rich lands by the Indian government and the private sector have led to an escalation in the conflict and to the further disempowerment of poor locals.

Regional disparities in India are vast

The Indian government’s response to these injustices and the resulting violence has been inadequate and unsuccessful. One tactic used, especially vigorously in the state of Chhattisgarh, has been to attack and silence non-violent human rights activists who speak out about the violence perpetrated by state governments and private militias against innocent citizens – overwhelmingly poor adivasis (indigenous people).

The highest profile case has been with Dr. Binayak Sen – a noted human rights activist and a pediatrician working with many of the states’ poorest families. Chhattisgarh’s High Court recently upheld his shocking life sentence for sedition and treason despite a lack of evidence that he conspired with Naxalites to commit violent acts. The state’s draconian and undemocratic laws put in place to fight the Naxalites, the Chhattisgarh Special Public Security Act of 2005 (CSPSA), and similar to laws in Kashmir and the Northeast used to fight separatists make this type of persecution possible.

Less well-known individuals also have been accused of aiding the Naxalites and thrown in jail, including activist Kartam Joga, cinematographer TG Ajay, and Kolkata businessman Piyush Guha. Other human rights defenders and organizations have been forced to flee Chhattisgarh due to threats and harassment by police and district authorities. The Indian Supreme Court has been the one official body that has dared to intervene, releasing Dr. Sen for lack of evidence once already, hearing a petition against the Chhattisgarh government submitted by Kartam Joga and two other activists, and reprimanding the Chhattisgarh government for its failure to rein in anti-Maoist militias who have been accused of extensive human rights abuses.

As these cases wind their way through the courts, attract international concern, and spark protest and outrage in India, one should be concerned for India’s future. Perhaps fueling the fire, Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh said in 2007:

Left-wing extremism is probably (the) biggest security challenge to the Indian state. It continues to be so and we cannot rest in peace until we have eliminated this virus….We need to cripple the hold of Naxalite forces with all the means at our command.

In reality, the Naxalite threat to the Indian state, though widespread and growing as well as disruptive, remains far from toppling state governments, let alone the central government – its goal by 2050. At the risk of disagreeing with Dr. Singh, the bigger threat, as I see it, is how the Indian government responds to the Naxalites – not so different from the dilemma facing the United States in its war on terrorism.

Naxalites pose localized threats, and the murders, kidnappings, and other violent acts they commit must be condemned. However, they do not threaten Indian democracy as a whole. At least not yet. However, if the government – at the local, state and national level – responds clumsily, disproportionately, or unwisely to the threat, these blunders could do far more to harm the legitimacy of and faith in the government and the democratic system as a whole. Jailing non-violent activists attempting to improve the lives of people stuck in these conflict zones sends the wrong message and runs counter to the government’s own interests in these areas.

For now, the use of laws like the CSPSA is an exception to the rule (which is certainly not to say that India’s justice system is otherwise without problems). In much of India there is a healthy respect for human rights and the rule of law and an independent and respected judiciary. Or at least those ideas are given lip service.

And in other parts of the country,  the political system – for all its faults – is far more responsive to and representative of its citizens than those in the feudal backwaters where the Naxalites thrive. The silencing of human right defenders is fortunately rare, but Chhattisgarh foreshadows a darker and more authoritarian India struggling to overcome serious threats to its national integrity while promoting reliable security and economic development for its people.

The only anti-war candidate?

It does look like there will be at least one candidate in next year’s presidential primaries opposing these policies – Republican Texas Congressman Ron Paul.  Paul, however, does not support the federal government taking a significant role in environmental protection, health care, reducing economic inequality and a lot of other things.  But unless antiwar Democrats do something, Paul’s libertarian campaign will represent the only significant 2012 primary season challenge to what he calls “America’s delusional foreign policy.”

It’s a year now since Harper’s Magazine publisher John R. MacArthur first publicly called for a challenge to Obama from the left.  And for a while the idea did gain a little traction, but it seemed to disappear when the President won a few legislative victories in the lame duck Congress.  Still, even those who hold fast to the Clinton-era “It’s the economy stupid” take on presidential politics can’t avoid asking to what better use the Afghanistan War’s $119 billion annual budget might be put in the midst of the greatest recession in seventy years.

The reason for the reluctance is, of course, to a great extent a legacy of Ted Kennedy’s 1980 primary challenge to Jimmy Carter followed by Ronald Reagan’s election.  Err in a hasty primary challenge and repent for a leisurely four years, the thinking goes.  Bill Clinton got a primary-free re-election in 1996 in some large part because of that take.  Longtime San Francisco community organizer Mike Miller sums up the current fear:

A perilous course being proposed by “progressives” that, if successful, will contribute to a Republican government—both houses of Congress and the White House—in 2012. That course is to nominate a ‘progressive’ to run against Obama in the primaries and, implicitly, sit out the election if Obama is the nominee.

If A, then B?  Is it impossible then to challenge the Administration in the way that really matters – electorally – without helping to usher in a President we’d find worse – both in domestic and foreign affairs?  Not an unreasonable fear, I’d say, yet not one that should prevent us from taking a broader look at the situation.

For one thing, while Clinton’s foreign policy may itself have left something to be desired (the U.S. did bomb Afghanistan, Iraq, Somalia, Sudan and Yugoslavia on his watch), nothing he did remotely approached the insanity of the current $1,000,000-a-year per soldier war with no perceptible goal other than to negotiate in the future with the Taliban enemy that we fight today.   So, in this case it’s not just nameless/faceless foreigners euphemistically referred to as “collateral damage”– there are Americans being asked to die.

As for the political dangers inherent in the enterprise, well Joe Biden ran against Barack Obama in 2008 and that seemed to work out all right.  To be sure, we would want a level-headed challenge, rather than one primarily fueled by personal anger at Obama.  Disappointment, sure, but even MacArthur’s initial appeal to those who “feel betrayed by Obama’s expansion of the war in Afghanistan and mercenary forces in Iraq” seems slightly off.  Those feeling betrayed by Obama’s expansion of the Afghanistan War really have only themselves to blame, in that he told us that this was precisely his intent.  But he also managed to accomplish what all successful presidential candidates do – he convinced a lot of voters that he really believed what they did, even when he said he didn’t.  People rationalized that he just said all that stuff about Afghanistan because he had to if he wanted to get elected.

Robert Naiman, Policy Director of the organization Just Foreign Policy, goes so far as to say that:

A key organizing principle of a progressive primary has to be something that many may find at first counterintuitive: it must not be directed against President Obama.

What it should be is directed at some of his policies and aimed at building and demonstrating a political base for a series of alternatives.

Can the left make him do it in Afghanistan?

Over the last two years, many of us have heard more than one variation on the story of FDR telling those to his left that if they wanted him to do something, they had to go out and “make me do it.”  And surely there is something to that – you’ve got to somehow demonstrate a motivated constituency to be a political player.  This is precisely why we should be seriously thinking about what we can do during the upcoming primary season which seems, realistically, to be about the only time we’re going to have much chance of exerting pressure on Obama to rethink his wars.  What would be the goal of a primary challenge?  Several hundred delegates pledged to making the President do something different than he has been.

But, by the way, none of this is meant to suggest that foreign policy constitute the entire basis of a primary challenge, or even necessarily be its central element.  There seems little doubt that the basis for an antiwar candidacy exists – a December ABC News/Washington Post Poll found people answering “No” to the question “Do you think the war in Afghanistan has been worth fighting?” by a 60-34 percent margin (with only 25 percent of Democrats saying “Yes”) –  and this is with a minuscule amount of mainstream political opposition to the war.  Still, the cynical view that the domestic casualty rate – 500 U.S. military deaths and 4,500 wounded last year – is simply not high enough to turn this war into a mass issue may well be correct.

Either way, though, an ideal primary challenge would also take on the bank bailout, offer a broad government investment strategy and argue for improving the health care reform law as well.  And, of course, today’s wars represent only the tip of the iceberg: The U.S. currently maintains anywhere from seven hundred to a thousand foreign military bases and spends nearly as much as on its military apparatus as the entire rest of the world combined – because it is locked in a Cold War mindset in which Al Qaeda has replaced the Soviet Union.

Zimmerman in 2012?

In arguing that “Lefty focusing on Obama distracts us from the work we need to do,” New Left veteran Richard Flacks says:

Progressive organizations need to reinvest in college campus organizing.

And as far as focusing on Obama – the man goes, I think his critique is correct, but so far as certain of the President’s policies go, they seem to be precisely the thing that a progressive organization would organize against on a college campus.

As the man once said, “The times, they are a changing” and it seems a shame to let the libertarians be the only ones saying anything about that next year.

My real problem is that when I’ve written about past elections – in Bosnia and East Timor – I’d stayed in those countries long enough to feel that I really knew something about them, plus what was going on in those places was considered worldwide news at the time.  However, Kyrgyzstan, as the Kyrgyz Republic is more commonly known, remains obscure, its politics fairly impenetrable to the outsider.  What I can really describe with any authority is mostly limited to the experience of being an electoral observer.  Still, it seems somehow disrespectful not to at least first say something of the specifics of the election I observed.

Before being selected for the mission, I could not even have told you the name of Kyrgyzstan’s capital city – Bishkek.  My first glimmer of recognition, really, came when I saw the airport code letters on my baggage claim – FRU.  Ah, this was the city that used to be called Frunze!  Although I don’t know much about central Asia, I do know something about the history of the Soviet Union, so this meant something to me.

Mikhail Frunze was a military hero of the Russian Revolution who later succeeded Trotsky as leader of the entire Soviet military apparatus.  Some even considered him a possible successor to Lenin.  Frunze had a medical problem involving ulcers. He apparently did not consider the situation all that serious, but Comrade Stalin – always greatly concerned over the well being of possible successors to Lenin – did.  In 1925, he convinced Frunze to undergo an operation for his condition, an operation he did not survive.  Frunze was given a hero’s funeral in Moscow; people named their sons after him; the authorities named a military academy in his honor; the city of his birth also took his name.  And Stalin had one less rival.  (Strangely, the four doctors involved in the operation are said to have all died in 1934.)

THE SWITZERLAND OF CENTRAL ASIA

All of that, of course, is part of the history of another era.  Today, the former Soviet republic has a population of about 5.2 million – 69% Kyrgyz, a Turkic people; 15% Uzbeks, mostly living in the south; and 9% Russians, mostly in the north.  The country is sometimes called “the Switzerland of Central Asia.”  Its similarities with that wealthy European nation are entirely topographic – 80% of the country lies in the Tina Shan mountainous region, and not economic – it was the second poorest of Soviet republics and is now the second poorest country in Central Asia.  It is rich in mineral resources, but has negligible petroleum and natural gas reserves and must import these products.  Some believe as much as 40% of its GDP derives from the up to 800,000 Kyrgyz migrants currently working in Russia.

Kurmanbek Bakiyev

Kyrgyzstan enjoys the unusual distinction of hosting both Russian and American military airbases on its soil.  The Russian government is there because it aims to dominate the area that used to be the Soviet Union; the U.S. is there because it aims to dominate the world.  The American Manas Air Base opened in 2001 to support U.S. military operations in Afghanistan.  In February 2009, then-President Kurmanbek Bakiyev announced plans to close it, a decision supported by a 78–1 vote in Parliament.  The decision was reversed in June, however, and the base remains under a new contract with annual rent increased from $17.4 million to $60 million.

This past April, Bakiyev, the country’s second president since independence, was ousted  in an uprising that took about 85 lives. Two months later, 90% of voters approved a referendum creating a new 120-member parliament.  We – the 200 short term and 40 long term observers from 23 member nations of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) – would be observing the first elections to that body.

This was my eighth OSCE mission, but the first where I can recall the existence of an emergency evacuation plan being so prominently discussed in our briefings. Group visas for Kazakhstan were secured for those of us deployed in the north and for Tajikstan for the observers in the south.  The impetus for the heightened security concerns was less the April events than the June clashes between Uzbeks and Kyrgyz.  Centered in Osh, Kyrgyzstan’s second largest city located in the southern part of the country, that conflict left more than 200 dead, perhaps 2,000 injured, 400,000 people internally displaced and about 110,000 seeking refuge in Uzbekistan (almost all since returned.)  The evacuation plans weren’t needed, though, as no serious incidents occurred on what turned out to be a quiet election day.  So, although I was far enough north to see Kazakhstan for a good part of that day, we never had the occasion to go there.

With 29 parties in the running, none received more than 16% of the vote; five parties exceeded the threshold required for representation in the new parliament.  In my own, obviously limited, election day experience, voting seemed rather normal.  And if the counting we observed at day’s end seemed somewhat raggedy, it did not appear to be with intent.  Recommendations were made for improvements, as is the norm, but as one mission coordinator said, “I have observed many elections in Central Asia over the years, but this is the first election where I could not predict the outcome.”

As was the case with the earlier short-lived one, the new government will be led by the Social Democratic Party which finished second overall.  Sometimes described as a party of entrepreneurs, it counts the country’s acting president Roza Otunbayeva among its members.  The coalition also includes the Ata Zhurt, or Fatherland Party, the largest party in parliament, which supports past president Bakiyev; and Respublika, a new party founded and led by Omurbek Babanov, said to be one of the richest people in Kyrgyzstan. Parties in Parliament but not in the coalition are Ar-Namys (Dignity), considered conservative and pro-Russian party, and Ata-Meken (Motherland) which is considered liberal and pro-Western. All of the above descriptions of the government parties should be taken with a grain of salt and I do not pretend to have any real sense of the dynamics involved in the creation of the coalition. From here on I will confine myself to describing what the observation mission was like.

Like most OSCE missions, this one began with a centralized training in the capital, after which most observers were deployed elsewhere in the country. Some will always stay put, however, and this time I was one of that group. Although I would not get to see any other part of the country, there was an upside to staying put – I would not be among the group flying on a domestic airplane.  Not that I have anything against such things generally, but Kyrgyzstan appears on a list of countries whose airlines may not operate services of any kind within the European Union, due to their inadequate safety standards, a distinction not generally considered reassuring by the group that did have to fly.

DID YOU HOUSE THEM IN A BROTHEL?

Bischkek

My Bishkek-area assignment also meant that I stayed put in the quite comfortable but more expensive businessman’s hotel where we had trained.  We had been advised to bring sleeping bags, but I wound up not having to deal with any iffy accommodations – and had wireless Internet in my room. My friend Nancy, whom I’ve known since Sarajevo in 1997 and was my housemate there the next summer, was not so fortunate.  She called about 9 PM the night before the election.  Said she needed to vent – she’d been put up in a brothel.

First she’d noted all the cars parked outside. And then there was the fact that her room had only neon lighting – she’d complained to the management that she couldn’t read by it. (She showed us a picture later and, yup, it’d have been pretty hard to study your election manual in her room, I think.) Finally the doors opening and closing through the night got her out of her room and downstairs where she came upon a group of customers mingling with the service providers – a bunch of young naked men eating meat with the prostitutes, as she described it.  Our LTOs (Long Term Observers) had somehow missed this aspect when they were sizing up potential accommodations. Nancy won “Best story of the 2010 Kyrgyzstan mission” hands down, I’d say. And  I couldn’t help but imagine mission review forms containing the question:

Did Long Term Observers house Short Term Observers in a brothel?   Yes __ No __

My encounters with the, uh, night life were much tamer. My only accomplishment of any note was getting to what I understood to be both of Bishkek’s brewery pubs. Our LTOs took care of one of them for me by organizing the local group get together at the Blonder Pub.  (The beer seemed pretty much entry-level brewery pub fare – distinct from the bottled Russian Sibirskoe Koronna back at the hotel, but in itself nothing special.)  The evening’s highlight – which I missed due to having an internal clock sufficiently grounded to deliver me to the event my customary a-little-bit-late, even though thirteen time zones ahead – was being wanded for weapons at the door. The word on this was that it probably was less the likelihood of people actually carrying weapons that accounted for this than the fact that wanding was all the rage in the major clubs in Moscow, so that any place in Bishkek with aspirations of being a serious destination needed to wand.

The Steinbrau brewpub was another matter. First off, they had a beer garden, built by the Volga Germans who settled here after World War II, having been removed from the Volga region during the war. I understand that they pretty much all cleared out of Kyrgyzstan during Perestroika when they were finally able to exercise their right to return to Germany, from their ancestors had come in the days of the Tsars.  But you could still see signs of them in towns with names written in Latin rather than Cyrillic letters, like Luxemburg (named not for the country, but after Rosa, the World War I era German/Polish socialist leader), and places like Steinbrau. No one on the premises looked remotely German the day I was there, but they had clearly left the recipes behind because the place served a very creditable line of German style beers.

There’s a certain summer camp atmosphere to these missions – a bunch of people thrown together for a short time grappling with sorting out the personalities and backgrounds (and accents) that present themselves – that can make them habit forming. You might meet Social Democrats from Berlin, Republicans from Colorado, Left Party members from Sweden, naturalized Russians living in Marin.  The most interesting part for me is trying to root out any potential foreign soul mates who might be there – say, Europeans who consider being socialist a matter of common sense.

When I met Jan from Germany and learned he was active in the Social Democratic Party (SDP), I immediately told him I was an admirer of Oscar Lafontaine and received a mock scowl in reply. Of course, if I had thought about it for a moment beforehand, I’d have no reason to be surprised – LaFontaine, after all,  represents the party’s most prominent defection in decades. Once the SDP chairman and lead candidate, in 1999 he resigned his position as Finance Minister in the SDP-led government and subsequently took up leadership of the upstart Left Party. Jan did concede, though, that Lafontaine does give the best speeches. (I’ll admit that although it hadn’t been my goal, I kind of enjoyed out-lefting a German leftist – I don’t think they expect that from an American, you know.)

In 2005, the parties of the (lower case) left actually won the German election, and yet the Social Democrats dropped from senior party in a coalition with the Green Party to junior partner in a “grand coalition” with the conservative Christian Democrats, their principal opponents.  The problem was that the SDP and Greens wouldn’t consider a coalition with the Left Party, even though it received more votes than the Greens.  They considered its democratic credentials tainted by its partial roots in the Socialist Unity Party that governed the former East German Democratic Republic. And, for its part, the Left Party professed antipathy to a coalition with the “reformist” parties.

Jan explained that, as a member of the left wing of the SDP, he would personally prefer to have the Left Party in a coalition because he thought that making them do what you have to do to actually be in government (as opposed to criticizing it from the outside) would diminish their appeal, along with their vote, as has already happened in Berlin.  But for now, he says, talk of an all-left coalition has subsided since current polls show that a simple red-green (SDP-Green) coalition could defeat Angela Merkel’s government. Well, this was a certainly a discussion not to be had back home.

WHY DO YOU SPEAK SUCH GOOD ENGLISH?

Observers on these missions have to work in English: all briefings are in English and local translators are hired for their ability to speak English. You will hear some interesting accents. A Scandinavian sitting next to me at our local Bishkek-group debriefing asked, “Do you understand the Frenchman?” referring to one of our two LTOs. In my experience, you can expect Scandinavians you meet on these occasions to speak pretty darn good English and this fellow was no exception, but I suppose he still wondered if somehow a native speaker might be able to hear through the accent better than he. But no, while our other LTO from Belarus spoke good international English, the French LTO’s accent was about as difficult as any I’ve run into on one of these missions – among anyone who was said to actually speak English, that is. I suspect he encountered a lot of nodding assent.

Still, he probably went home thinking that at least I understood him better than my Swiss German observing partner Cristoph did, anyhow. At one point on election day Cristoph’s phone rang just as he had started asking a local poll worker the standard list of questions on how the election was going, so he handed it off to me.  It was the French LTO. Well, he and I were having a very difficult time of it, things not made easier by there being some type of music broadcasting out front of the polling station. I told him to hold on while I looked for a better place.  He hung up and called back but it was no better, so he hung up again. Five minutes later my own phone rang and it was he. He explained that he had called my partner but couldn’t understand him so he thought he’d try me. And, in fact, now that we’d practiced a little (and I suppressed my laughter), he and I managed to communicate significantly better than when he had called Cristoph!

That conversation certainly gave me my biggest laugh of the day (second best was observing the drunken wedding guest reduced to crawling across the floor of a restaurant we stopped in), but Cristoph and I generally amused each other through the long observing day and night.  In fact, our foursome – including Ashkat, our ethnic-Kyrgyz translator, and Evgeniy, our ethnic-Russian driver – got on quite well, I thought, through our entire assignment that included pre-election reconnoitering of the assigned area, election day visits to maybe eleven polling places, observing closing and counting at one of them, and then several hours at a regional tallying center. We did not, however, have any kind of post election lunch where people promise to name their children after each other and that sort of thing, which will sometimes occur at these affairs.  No women in our group, you know.

Of course, so far as language goes, not everyone might say that all of us Americans necessarily spoke the best English, either.  After a few evenings’ conversations, Jan (from Germany, as you may recall)  asked, “As an American why do you speak such good English?”  I laughed.  He said, “No, I’m serious,” and motioning toward a woman from Seattle said, “I can’t understand her at all.”

I’ll have you know this was not the first time I have been complimented on my English. I explained that what he heard from me was a conscious effort to speak slowly, clearly, loud and without unnecessarily complicated construction. I suppose I had the advantage over a lot of the Americans in that the first mission I went on was long – nine weeks registering voters in Sarajevo following the Bosnian civil war – so I’d had time to absorb the fact that an effort to speak like that would go a long way. On these short, week or so missions it may just never occur to some of the Americans that they’re frequently being understood only with difficulty – and that there’s something they might do about it.

On one occasion, also in Bosnia, the overall observation group was so large that the U.S. delegation alone filled an entire charter flight (on an airline, by the way, that no one had heard of before, with on-flight films subtitled in Hebrew and Arabic, which prompted much speculation as to the company’s “normal” business.)  With numbers like this, the usual effort to mix the nationalities was dispensed with and observers simply deployed en masse as they arrived. This resulted in a hotel in the town of Bugojno chock full of American observers most of whom had not done this sort of thing before.  This meant there was even less awareness than usual that someone might have difficulty understanding you if you spoke as if you were in a supermarket in New York or Kansas. Our trainer from the Netherlands who, by any reasonable measure, spoke excellent English, found himself periodically flummoxed by a rapid fire paragraph delivered in American. Jan probably would have encountered an entire hotel bar full of people he didn’t understand.

Since I knew the entire country of Kyrgyzstan has only five million people or so, and the capital was, to my reckoning, way out there in the middle of nowhere – 6750 miles from either San Francisco or New York City, 2150 miles from Beijing and 1850 miles from Moscow – I figured it for a population of maybe 50-100,000.  So I was quite surprised when our LTOs said that it was upwards of a million.  Elsewhere I see the figure put at 800,000 and it’s always hard to know whether people are speaking of a city proper or its metropolitan area, but you get the idea.  The place was no doubt quite a bit more sophisticated than I’d figured.

I had the good fortune of seeing the national history museum in the company of an American colleague who was a Russian native.  Naturally she could read all the material about the Russian Revolution and seemed a bit taken aback by my knowledge of and interest in the subject. Someone once said that you could define the entire American left by the point at which they thought the Russian Revolution went bad, but that’s some time ago and I don’t really think I was ever able to satisfactorily explain my interest to her. The museum had a couple of shops with Kyrgyz artifacts, including a large piece of locally made tapestry that greatly interested the very conservative Republican Colorado state legislator in our group (whose his presence at a foreign election not a month before his own apparently stemmed from his representing the fifth most Republican district in the state and perceiving little real challenge.) Unfortunately the tapestry turned out to have the image of V.I. Lenin sewn into it. I suggested he might just have it replaced with Ronald Reagan when he got back home, but he decided against.

Frunze Museum

I made two unsuccessful tries at the art museum – the second time it was closed for a party, but I did make it to the most unusual of the city’s museums: the Frunze Museum opened in 1974 and built over the actual house in which Frunze grew up, with upper floors devoted to photos and clippings of his life and the Revolution. It was as spare a museum as I’ve ever visited. There was not a brochure, postcard, or memento of any kind in sight. Even the admission tickets seemed to be the sort of generic item you’d buy at a discount store to use for a raffle.  I suppose they weren’t beating down the doors to reminisce about Frunze these days.

TAXI TO THE SNOW LEOPARDS?

Of course, you wouldn’t generally travel to Bishkek for the museums.  On the other hand, it did have a feature that I haven’t seen the like of in any other large city: You could get a taxi at your hotel that would take you to a national park that purported to have snow leopards.  Try that in Manhattan.  And, no, the Central Park Zoo doesn’t count – there were no cages here, or anything. Of course we didn’t actually see any snow leopards, but that was probably just as well, and we were definitely farther out there than at Far Rockaway, or even Walden Pond.  I’d probably have seen a lot more national parks if you could take cabs to them – or if they were on subway stops or something.  And, as a bonus, on the way back, we happened onto what I’d call a monument park, for lack of knowing any better way to describe it, dedicated to Manas, the hero of the Kyrgyz national epic poem, done in the most wonderful colors.  The significance of the place was simply beyond the comprehension of us westerners not familiar with the poem – which is said to run 500,000 lines.

You learn a pretty random collection of things about a city or a country in eight days. You’ll probably pick up something about their bars and their money changing: I discovered that they made quite good cognac in the country and that their currency exchange offices refuse to take any currency (or at least any American currency, anyhow) with any kind of stray ink or other mark on it.  I later hear that they will accept it at a discount, though – they’ll offer you, say, $40 for a $50 dollar bill.  And Evgeniy tells us that they’ll then sell it back to you if you trade for dollars – at full value, of course.

Perhaps my favorite part of any mission is that last night in the hotel lobby when the observers are all there drinking away their remaining local currency.  This one was particularly leisurely because most flights to and from Bishkek happen at three or four in the morning in order to fit into flight schedules of the more mainstream parts of the world. The last night is a time when you can turn to chat with the person sitting next to you whom you haven’t previously met, find that he’s a member of the Left Party (another “reformed Communist party,” but in this case one free of the stigma of having run a dictatorship), and have one final conversation like you won’t be able to have back home.

And you might even get one final shot at tourism. My college friend Joe (who’s also been on a number of these missions but never before with me) and I made use of about three and a half available hours in Istanbul to grab visas, take the subway down to the Blue Mosque, look at several famous places that there wasn’t time to enter due to prohibitive lines – even on a drizzly midweek morning – and drink Turkish coffee overlooking the walls of the Topkapi Palace.

The next morning I will be trying to explain to American fifth graders where these places are.

Few Americans may recognize OSCE by name, but in addition to the above mentioned nations, the group includes virtually all of Europe, the U.S. and Canada and calls itself “the world’s largest regional security organization” with “56 participating States” spanning “the geographical area from Vancouver to Vladivostok.”  Its roots lie in the 1975 Helsinki Accords of the East-West détente era,  but it has assumed a larger role since the end of the Cold War, supervising the post-Yugoslav Civil War elections in Bosnia and acting as the prime electoral monitoring agent in former Eastern Bloc and Yugoslav nations.

OSCE also conducts less intensive “assessment” missions – to review the “administrative and legal framework for the conduct of elections” in long established democratic member nations.  The U.S. Mission was conducted by the organization’s Parliamentary Assembly, with 56 observers included 42 Members of Parliament from 21 countries who were briefed in Washington D.C. and sent to observe voting in six states and the District of Columbia.

Although finding that “polling proceeded in a calm and well-organized manner,” the observers were struck by the “lack of voter secrecy” due to “voting booths and electronic voting machines … often placed too close to each other, which enabled clear insight as to how a voter marked the ballot,” as well as “the widespread possibility to vote without any picture I.D.” – a requirement in most of the elections the organization monitors.

The foreign law makers also noted the degree to which “the electoral system continues to be decentralized and highly diverse with a lack of uniform country-wide standards,” adding that “there are several voting systems within some states, as regulations are made at the local county level” and even “the right to access polling stations by international election observers is regulated by state law, and in some cases parliamentary observers were not able to observe the voting inside polling stations.”  All of this will come as no surprise to anyone remembering the infamous “hanging chads” and “butterfly ballots” of the 2000 presidential election.

What is new, however, and, judging from the space their brief report accords it, what apparently made the strongest impression upon the OSCE Mission was “money playing a significant role in creating an uneven playing field between candidates.”  Noting that “the Supreme Court ruled in Citizens United v. FEC that private corporations should enjoy the same rights as individuals regarding campaign spending, tying this to the right of freedom of speech in the U.S. Constitution,” they found the ruling expanding “possibilities for interest groups, including private corporations” and likely helping “to determine the outcome in a number of races.”

The fact that “many political ads did not reveal the source of the funding, as this is not required by law,” struck them as undermining “the transparency and accountability in the elections,” which “could also lead to questions of whether all donations originated in the U.S., as the law stipulates in the Federal Election Campaign Act, or whether any funds came from foreign sources.”

So, in case you’ve been thinking that giving corporations a free hand in the electoral process represents a fundamental threat to American democracy, at least you know you’re not alone in this world.  And if you’ve been wondering just how big a deal that Supreme Court decision was, well the Sunlight Foundation – an American “non-profit, nonpartisan organization that uses the power of the Internet to catalyze greater government openness and transparency,” as it describes itself – estimates “outside groups raised and spent $126 million on elections without disclosing the source,” constituting “more than a quarter of the total $450 million spent by outside groups.”  And adding “the $60 million spent by groups that were allowed to raise unlimited money, but still had to disclose … the total amount of outside money made possible by the Citizens United ruling reaches $186 million or 40 percent of the total.”

Humongous jump in corporate electoral spending results in big wins for candidates with leave-big-business-alone platforms.

The above would pretty much qualify as a “Dog bites man” headline.  So maybe from that point of view we can understand why the newsmedia might not bother to treat this as the overriding story of the election.  I mean, what else would we expect, really?   And the fact that more of CNN’s election day exit poll respondents blamed Wall Street for the country’s current economic problems than either George W. Bush (the runner-up choice) or Barack Obama and still voted the way they did tells us how very effective that spending was in obfuscating the issues.

The biggest question coming out of the elections, of course, remains unanswered as of yet. And it will not be answered by studies, observation missions or news reporting.  Are we willing and able to save our democracy from going to the highest bidder?

Tom Gallagher has participated in eight OSCE missions, most recently in Kyrgyzstan.  Contact him at TomGallagherwrites.com

On the one hand, these elections were held under less-than-ideal circumstances. They were marred by inexcusable corruption, violence, vote rigging, and the silencing of opposition voices in the media and on the streets.

On the other hand, they also represent a process and an outcome that the international community and those living in these countries appear to have largely accepted and agreed with. While elections were not as free and fair as most would have liked or expected, they were elections that – for all their flaws – appear to have granted victory to the candidate who the most people voted for.

For all his faults, Ahmadinejad likely won the most votes.

Yes, Ahmendinijhad in Iran, Karzai in Afghanistan, and Rajapaksa in Sri Lanka are all pretty unsympathetic figures and definitely played dirty to win the presidency in their respective countries. Yet there seems little doubt that they all won far more votes than their challengers – even given the doubts about the legitimacy of many of those votes. Even in Iran, Ahmendinijhad’s support has been widespread and not limited to rural areas.

So, what do we make of such elections? Foreign critics and the domestic opposition have good reason, as well as the right, to complain about the flaws and undemocratic tactics used by the winners to secure power. Their concerns after elections should certainly be heeded and investigated. Winning an election should not give the victor absolute power or the right to repress and persecute critics and minorities.

Yet, in the absence of evidence that an election was clearly stolen, the elected government – however odious – should also be respected and acknowledged as the legitimate voice of the people of that country. America’s strategic interests will surely color how the US government and public see such leaders (Ahmedinijhad = bad, a threat, Karzai = corrupt but tolerable, a needed partner, Rajapaksa = who cares?), but there should always be an awareness that elections often are contested, dirty things even the most robust democracies (in the US too – Florida 2000 anyone?).

The precarious balancing of these two realities will, I suspect, become essential as more countries embrace elections without being interested or even understanding the civil and human rights that many developed countries have traditionally expected to naturally go along with democracy. While the outcome of elections in places like the US, Canada, Europe, Japan, India (along with others) are not generally called into question, elections in many parts of the developing world are not as clear cut.

Another recent election winner, Mahinda Rajapaksa of Sri Lanka

As citizens and as part of the international community how will we respond to such elections? How do such elections potentially change our relations with certain countries? Will the US government recognize such elections? How should we engage with corrupt leaders with no respect for the rule of law or human rights who have also won have seemingly won elections? How do we balance the importance of the process of having a free and fair election with the actual freedoms on the ground if one does not necessarily imply the other?

To deny the legitimacy of an seemingly fair election seems condescending and ignores the voices of millions of people who may legitimately disagree with us. To accept their legitimacy seems to deny the very real flaws of such a system and the hardships faced by its challengers. Such complex and obfuscated elections in many parts of the developing world who are beginning to experiment with democracy will undoubtedly complicate US (and other countries’) foreign policy in years to come.

Upcoming elections in places like Burma, Tajikistan, the Philippines, Sudan, Iraq, Egypt, Ukraine, and another in Sri Lanka, will test how the international community responds to potentially complicated and fraudulent elections. Democracy is far from robust in many of these countries, but it is still largely democratic compared to many neighboring countries. To challenge the legitimacy of these elections may risk indirectly leading to a collapse of any hope for future votes.

Of course, each election must be evaluated and responded to on its own terms, and it is important to consider democracy an ideal to strive towards, not a simple definition that invites a conclusive yes or no answer. Democracy is not black and white – there are many shades of gray. Elections serve a purpose, but are always flawed and complicated. Get used to it.