Like most countries, America’s collective attention span only really allows for one big story at a time. Until last week the consuming obsession was the hunt for the Washington sniper. Then it was the climax of baseball’s ”world series” (actually a contest between two teams from California). Only now can Americans turn to the next big thing: the national elections which take place next Tuesday.
Not that it really feels like a national event. Once you’re here what is visible is not so much a single, big picture but a diffuse mosaic made up of countless little images – a thousand little races in search of a theme.
In each battle it is the specific and the local which looks set to be decisive. In Arkansas, a ”family values” Republican senator may go down because Christian conservatives can’t forgive him leaving his wife of 29 years for a new woman, 14 years his junior. In Florida, Governor Jeb Bush faces super-motivated Democratic voters bent on avenging the antics of 2000 which delivered the state for his brother. In Minnesota, a huge sympathy vote is heading the Democrats’ way, after the incumbent senator, Paul Wellstone, died in a plane crash with his wife and daughter last Friday. Alive, he may have lost; dead, his party seems set to win.
The leads change with each day’s polls. Both parties now accept that Democrats are likely to make key gains in the 36 state governorships that are up for grabs, but the rest is too close to call. Neither side can forecast what will happen to the Republicans’ wafer-thin majority in the House of Representatives, where every seat is on the ballot next Tuesday, or if Democrats will boost or lose their one-seat hold on the Senate (where 34 seats are up for election). No one has been able to divine a national trend.
Some will say that’s what midterm elections are always like: when the White House is not up for grabs, every battle is local. But that is not the whole story. The last midterms, in 1998, became a national referendum on Zippergate, with voters punishing Republicans for trying to hound Bill Clinton from office. Four years earlier, the pendulum had swung the other way as Americans repudiated Clinton’s perceived left-turn on healthcare and crime.
This time, there is no such grand struggle, a fact which pollsters say is dampening voter interest – and which could lead to a turnout next week low even by US standards. None of which is helped by the tendency among candidates on both sides to fudge and soften the differences between them, rather than to mark out a clear, ideological divide. In conservative New Hampshire, for example, Jeanne Shaheen praises George Bush’s stance on Iraq and tax cuts – yet she’s the Democrat. In duck-hunting, Bible-bashing Arkansas, Mark Pryor avows his commitment to Jesus and to guns: he’s a Democrat, too. Many Republicans are playing the same game – trying to sound like Democrats on public services and pensions. The motivation is understandable enough: they all want to be in the moderate centre, where the votes are. But first confusion, and then apathy, seems to be the result.
This represents a failure for both main parties, but chiefly for Democrats. As the ”opposition”, they should have been able to make 2002 a referendum on a Republican administration which has presided over a sharp economic downturn. That, after all, is the issue which normally decides elections. With the Dow Jones tumbling daily and consumer confidence going the same way, the Republicans should have been in for a good hiding.
But voters just don’t seem to see it that way. ”They have concern, they have angst, but they don’t have anger,” says Republican pollster Ed Goeas. They blame the natural tides of the economic cycle, and September 11, but not the Bush administration for their woes. Remarkably, says Goeas, even those people who have suffered most directly – middle-aged Americans with savings tied up in the plunging stock market – favour the Republicans.
T he Democrats have not even managed to tar the Republicans with the mud of corporate failure. Enron, WorldCom and the rest may have turned Americans off corporate bosses, but that disapproval does not extend to Bush, vice-president Dick Cheney or any of the boardroom Republicans swarming around Washington. In other words, voters see the corporate scandals as separate from the troubled economy – and see neither as the Republicans’ fault.
There may be a simple explanation. Republicans have been insulated from anger, and even sharp criticism, for over a year by the most powerful shield in US politics: patriotism and national security. After 9/11 it became unseemly to attack the president and, by extension, his party. The mood of national unity has been prolonged, with the chief enemy switched from Osama bin Laden to Saddam Hussein. In normal times, and with the economy faltering, Democrats would have created a national backlash against the president by now and be on course for big wins next week. But these are not normal times. All the Democratic assaults on domestic matters bounce off the Republican shield of patriotism and war.
Next week already feels like a stalemate election, with some contests so close teams of lawyers are already preparing themselves for Florida 2000-style battles over recounts and, who knows, even the odd hanging chad. Bush will not get the Republican landslide that 9/11 once made seem probable. Nor do Democrats anticipate the knockout victory a bumpy economy would normally guarantee an opposition party. Each factor – war and the economy – cancels out the other.
Which is not to say that next week’s election does not matter. It may be close, it may lack a single theme, but the stakes are very high. Even if the house stays in Republican hands, the outcome in the Senate matters whichever way it breaks. If, as the latest numbers indicate, the Democrats edge ahead, they will have an invaluable brake on the Bush presidency. Crucially for those outside America, a comfortably Democratic senate could place a restraining hand on some of the administration’s wackier designs for the future shape of the world. Admittedly, the Democrat-led Senate this month passed a motion authorising Bush to use force against Iraq. But with an election looming, too few Democrats dared vote against it (the late Sen Wellstone was an honourable exception). With polling day out of the way, and armed with a proper majority, senate Democrats may be emboldened to defy the White House more often.
If the Republicans win the upper house, however, they will have full control of both executive and legislature. The Bush project will proceed untrammelled. Domestically, that will mean a slew of conservative judges appointed to the highest benches, including the Supreme Court; a raft of tax cuts which will balloon the budget deficit; and a surge of Republican confidence which will not be confined to the borders of the US.
Anyone in doubt whether next Tuesday matters should recall the doubters of 2000, who insisted there was nothing to separate Tweedledum Bush from Tweedledee Gore. There was plenty between the two parties then, as the world has seen all too clearly – and there is plenty at stake now. — Guardian Unlimited (c) Guardian Newspapers Limited 2001