United States President George W Bush is described by his critics throughout the world as an ideologically-driven unilateralist, beholden to the interests of big business and the resurgent forces of American neo-conservatism.
It is no secret that Bush has few fans among the African National Congress. His seemingly cordial relations with President Thabo Mbeki do not extend into the senior reaches of South Africa’s ruling party.
Even Madiba let his cool temperament slip when, on the eve of the Iraq war, he denounced Bush as a ”racist” and a man ”who cannot think properly”.
Yet there are aspects of the Bush presidency that deserve a closer look. In New York recently, on election day, I met with Maurice Tempelsman, a lifelong Democrat and one of Africa’s best friends in the upper echelons of American business. He drew my attention to the fact that Bush — despite his poor support among African-Americans — has driven a strong, principled and effective pro-Africa policy.
Tempelsman cited the Bush administration’s strong funding commitments for fighting HIV/Aids, its leadership in raising funds for the Millennium Challenge Account, its active involvement in peacemaking in Sudan and its support for the Africa Growth and Opportunity Act, which has immense trade benefits for the continent.
Each of these policies, Tempelsman pointed out, had required Bush and his national security advisers to expend considerable political capital on ”The Hill” in order to win over a reluctant Congress.
”W2”, as the New York Post calls Bush’s second term, might be reasonably good news for Africa.
Yet there is another way — and an altogether less obvious one — in which the Bush victory has relevance for us in South Africa: namely, the similarity between the strong success of the Republican Party in the US and the ANC here at home.
At first glance, these two parties have absolutely nothing in common.
The Republican Party has become the most powerful and effective right-wing party in the democratic world — and this in spite of the fact that it stands far to the right of European conservatism and even Richard Nixon’s administration.
The ANC’s conservatism largely — but not completely — begins and ends with fiscal rectitude. Mbeki is keen to position the ANC in the secular statist tradition of the social democrats of continental Europe, which sees the government and the state as the main engines of economic growth and redistribution.
The link between the electoral success of the ANC and the GOP (the ”Grand Old Party”, as the Republicans are sometimes known) lies in the methods they use to mobilise their respective and equally disparate voter bases.
The striking achievement of the Republicans — arguably its major achievement of the past two decades — has been, in the words of New York Times commentator Nicholas D Kristof, to persuade many of the working poor in the US’s heartland ”to vote for tax breaks for billionaires”.
The conventional wisdom in pre-election day the US strongly indicated that the president could not be re-elected because of his job-shedding, pro-rich economic record.
Yet on election day the Democratic Party’s efforts to improve the lot and lives of working-class Americans were blocked by the very people that they were trying to help. Millions of small farmers, factory workers and unemployed waitresses voted, in Kristof’s words, ”utterly against their own interests, for Republican candidates”.
The Democratic Governor of the state of Oregon, Ted Kulungoski, quipped that the Republicans had manipulated key social issues — guns, gays and God — ”to get the public to stop looking at what’s happening to them economically”.
That might sound very far away from our own shores and electoral rhythms, but consider the crises facing the base of South Africa’s electorate: more than eight million people out of work, five million suffering from HIV/Aids, and millions of victims of violent crime.
In objective terms, these voters could use their governments to put pressure on the government which has been on duty while these numbers rose so alarmingly.
The Republicans have used and abused moral and religious issues, and have invoked polarising questions from abortion to school prayer in order to mobilise and extend their voter base. Not surprisingly, Bush had the overwhelming support of white evangelical Christians, who today comprise one-quarter of all American voters.
Evangelicals cited ”moral values” as their top issue — and, in fact, ”moral values” beat every other topic, including Iraq and jobs, as the major matter on voters’ minds. Obviously Bush’s 58-million voters did not come from this group alone, but they formed the core of his support and they voted in numbers never seen before.
The parallel to South Africa is the way in which the ANC uses race as a mobilising tool par excellence, and how it depicts its opponents — particularly in the biggest and most successful opposition party — as ”anti-black”, ”anti-transformation” or ”anti-poor”.
This happens despite the presence and increasing prominence of blacks within the DA. The accusations are spread and repeated as a mantra despite the DA’s strongly pro-poor policies, many of which are more left-wing and radical than the ANC’s status-quo positions.
In the ”day after” analyses of the US election, commentators said that the American Democrats face a long haul in opposition and that the party must repudiate the Republicans’ demonisation and depiction of it as outside the American mainstream.
For South African Democrats, long used to opposition, this is all fairly familiar territory. Our task at home, I believe, is to use our forthcoming federal congress to connect our party with the cares and concerns of ordinary South Africans, particularly those in the black community, without alienating our current base.
Tony Leon is the leader of the Democratic Alliance