By Prensa Latina,
Washington : The crisis of the US economy under the administration of George W. Bush, making him the least popular President in memory, could make upcoming elections a “realigning” one, according to Chalmers Johnson.
In an article on the possible fate of the United States, published in the alternative news service, Alternet, Johnson sustains that for real changes to take place, votes would have to result in a “realigning election”, of which there have been only two in the past century: that of 1932 which elected Franklin Roosevelt and Richard Nixon in 1968.
Until 1932, the Republicans had controlled the presidency for 56 of the previous 72 years, beginning with Abraham Lincoln’s election in 1860. After 1932, the Democrats occupied the White House for 28 of the next 36 years.
In his new book, Democracy Incorporated, Princeton political theorist Sheldon Wolin says: “The American political system was not born a democracy, but born with a bias against democracy. It was constructed by those who were either skeptical about democracy or hostile to it. Democratic advance proved to be slow, uphill, forever incomplete.”
Ever since Roosevelt, the United States has experimented with maintaining a military economy and a civilian economy simultaneously. Over time, this has had the effect of misallocating vital resources away from investment and consumption, while sapping the country’s international competitiveness.
Socioeconomic conditions in 2008 bear a certain resemblance to those of 1932, making a realigning election conceivable. Unemployment in 1932 was a record 33 percent. In the fall of 2008, the rate is a much lower 6.1 percent, but other severe economic pressures abound.
These include massive mortgage foreclosures, bank and investment house failures, rapid inflation in the prices of food and fuel, the failure of the health care system to deliver service to all citizens, a growing global-warming environmental catastrophe due to the over-consumption of fossil fuels, continuing costly military interventions in Iraq and Afghanistan, with more on the horizon due to foreign policy failures (in Georgia, Ukraine, Palestine, Lebanon, Iran, Pakistan, and elsewhere), and record-setting budgetary and trade deficits.
Among the factors influencing elections, there are race, regionalism, change in party affiliation, the entry of first-time voters and the way swinging states like Florida and Ohio will vote.
Andrew Hacker, a political scientist at Queen’s College, New York, has written strikingly on this subject, starting with the phenomenon known as the “Bradley Effect.”
Numerous examples lead Hacker to offer this advice to Obama campaign offices: always subtract 7 percent from favorable poll results.
The race factor can be seen in many new gimmicks, including laws requiring voters to present official identity cards that include a photo, which, for all practical purposes, means either a driver’s license or a passport.
Many states drop men and women from the voting rolls who have been convicted of a felony but have fully completed their sentences, or require elaborate procedures for those who have been in prison — where, Hacker points out, black men and women outnumber whites by nearly six to one — to be reinstated.
Regionalism is the other obvious obstacle standing in the way of attempts to mobilize the electorate on a national basis for a turning-point election.
In their book, Divided America: The Ferocious Power Struggle in American Politics, the political scientists Earl and Merle Black argue that the US electorate is hopelessly split. “A new American regionalism, a pattern of conflict in which Democrats and Republicans each possess two regional strongholds and in which the Midwest, as the swing region, holds the balance of power in presidential elections.”
The Northeast is identified as democratic primary stronghold, unambiguously liberal Democratic. It is composed of New England (Connecticut, Maine, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Rhode Island, and Vermont), the Middle Atlantic states (Delaware, Maryland, New Jersey, New York, and Pennsylvania), and the District of Columbia.
There is a second Democrat region composed of California, Alaska, Hawaii, Oregon, and Washington. States where Democrats have won or lost, include Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Kentucky, Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri, Ohio, West Virginia, and Wisconsin.
On the other hand, the Republican stronghold is led by the South, with Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, and Virginia. The Mountains/Plains follow in importance, with 13 states: Arizona, Colorado, Idaho, Kansas, Montana, Nebraska, Nevada, New Mexico, North Dakota, Oklahoma, South Dakota, Utah, and Wyoming.
The two most important swing states in the nation are Florida (27 electoral votes) and Ohio (20 electoral votes), which the Democrats narrowly lost, generally under contested circumstances, in both 2000 and 2004.
Beyond these negatives, says Johnson, in 2008 there have been a number of developments that speak to the possibility of a turning-point election. First, the weakness (and age) of the Republican candidate may perhaps indicate that the Party itself is truly at the end of a forty-year cycle of power.
Other factors are the change in party affiliation and entry of new, first-time voters.
Above all, two main issues will determine whether or not the November election will be a realigning one, concludes the author of Blowback (2000), The Sorrows of Empire (2004), and Nemesis: The Last Days of the American Republic (2006).
Republican Party failures in managing the economy, in involving the country in catastrophic wars of choice, and in ignoring such paramount issues as global warming all dictate a Democratic victory.