Victory is Within Reach – Will Democrats Earn It?

With twenty or so days to go, it appears as though Barack Obama is poised to take the White House. But twenty days is an eternity in politics. Anything can happen – we could attack Iran, Osama might turn up, or people might discover that Obama has a knocked-up teen-aged daughter, which would be unforgivable for a black man.

I am often critical of Democrats, and they are so often worthy of criticism. They can be pale imitations of Republicans; they too-often agree in principle with Republican positions on taxes and war. Bush’s agenda could have been stopped if we had a genuine opposition party. But the Democrats didn’t put up much of a fight.

Bill Clinton, now a born-again liberal, governed as a Republican for his last seven years in office. He got his fingers burned on health care, and thereafter behaved himself. I often bring up the fact that 500,000 Iraqi kids perished on his watch. But it doesn’t register – a typical Democrat reading this paragraph will only see white spaces. 500,000 kids starved, malnutrition and preventable disease. The man in the tailored suit attending cocktail parties did this to them. Ah, the banality of evil.

But I did read something over at Counterpunch that caught my eye – I’ll quote and then cite:

The United States effectively has a one-party system, the business party, with two factions, Republicans and Democrats. There are differences between them. In his study Unequal Democracy: The Political Economy of the New Gilded Age, Larry Bartels shows that during the past six decades “real incomes of middle-class families have grown twice as fast under Democrats as they have under Republicans, while the real incomes of working-poor families have grown six times as fast under Democrats as they have under Republicans”.

The author of those words? Noam Chomsky. I never thought I’d see words like that from him. What next? Ralph Nader joins the party?

Barring election theft, always real possibility when votes are counted in secret, it appears as though we are in for a few years of Democratic rule. Republicans will go into lock-down mode, and will do all in their power to make governing impossible. It will be a fight.

Our job as citizens is to keep the pressure on them, to remind them that they are supposed to be somewhat progressive, to hold them to liberal standards. It starts on November 5th. We cannot afford what we had while Clinton was in power: a Democratic snoozathon.

If by chance I awake on that day to find that Sarah Palin is Vice President, I’ll be reminded what musical satirist Tom Lehrer said in 1973: “political satire became obsolete when Henry Kissinger was awarded the Nobel Prize.” If bimbo Sarah Palin assumes high office, the word “absurd” will no longer have meaning.