George Bush moves on

President George W. Bush at a campaign rally in St. Louis. - J. SCOTT APPLEWHITE/AP

The lack of an Opposition in the United States to dwell on the misdeeds of corporate America, which has destroyed family farms, locked out industrial workers and transformed free education into military combat, left the space open for the Republican Party to assemble the class resentments of the people into a programme against liberalism.

ON November 3, President George W. Bush chose to declare victory at the Ronald Reagan Building and International Trade Centre, less than half a mile from the White House. The venue is significant. Ronald Reagan was the last Republican to win a second term to the United States presidency, and Bush has fashioned himself as Reagan's heir. Saint Reagan's supply-side economics and belligerent anti-communism continue to enliven a range of Republican activists. His death, only six months before the election, allowed Bush to claim formally his mantle, and run for re-election in his name. While the Democrats described the morass into which the Republicans have led the U.S., Bush took a page out of Reagan's book and spoke of hope, and of another morning for America.

"In four historic years," Bush announced buoyantly, "America has been given great tasks and faced them with strength and courage. Our people have restored the vigour of this economy and shown resolve and patience in a new kind of war." In these lines Bush offered the two overt planks for his re-election: an economy on the rebound thanks to his tax cuts, and a war on terror fought with resolve. Of the 59.45 million voters who selected Bush, 86 per cent considered "terrorism" to be a major motivation, whereas only 18 per cent picked the economy. But these two issues did not bring them to the polls to support Bush. As far as the exit polls reveal, the voters who selected him came because he had superior "moral values". Bush only obliquely referred to religion in his speech, although it was religion that seems to have played such an enormous factor in his re-election. In a dig at his rival John Kerry's home State, Bush quoted from the 19th Century Episcopal preacher from Boston, Massachusetts, Phillips Brooks: "Do not pray for tasks equal to your powers; pray for powers equal to your tasks." Or, as Brooks himself interpreted these lines: "Do not pray for easy lives. Pray to be stronger men." Prayer and machismo - the two themes that ambushed John Kerry.

BY mid-2003, it had become clear that the election would be more about Bush than the issues. The rightward lurch of his administration after 9/11 had everything to do with the overall and long-term policy of the Republican Party, but for a variety of reasons the animus came on the personality of Bush. Among those who began to detest him, and, therefore, spend a considerable amount of time in ridicule and fear, the slogan emerged: Anyone But Bush (ABB). Liberals and radicals alike intoned this mantra in the hope that a worthy candidate, whatever his or her flaws, would emerge on the Democratic side to vanquish Bush. The liberal giant, The New Yorker, which had not endorsed a candidate in its eight-decade history, tepidly wished for Kerry over Bush. After telling its well-heeled readers that Kerry is after all not Bush, the magazine argued: "Kerry offers a clear, corrective, alternative to Bush's curious blend of smugness, radicalism and demagoguery." Bush's personality rankled, and even when one could list the various issues that differentiated the candidates, it was his smirk and his swagger that annoyed many. A bumper sticker put the disdain plainly: Somewhere in Texas, a village is missing an idiot.

But liberals were not alone in their condescension. A week before the election, the two-year-old American Conservative (founded by Nixon speechwriter and sometime presidential candidate Pat Buchanan) offered an endorsement of Kerry. Or sort of. Editor Scott McConnell's article entitled "Kerry's the One" assaulted Bush for his radicalism of the right. "Bush has behaved like a caricature of what a right-wing President is supposed to be, and his continuation in office will discredit any sort of conservatism for generations," wrote McConnell. What are some of the issues that particularly bother these conservatives? "The launching of an invasion against a country that posed no threat to the U.S., the doling out of war profits and concessions to politically favoured corporations, the financing the war by ballooning the deficit to be passed on to the nation's children, the ceaseless drive to cut taxes for those outside the middle class and working poor: it is as if Bush sought to resurrect every false 1960s-era left-wing cliche about predatory imperialism and turn it into administration policy." Because of this, McConnell argued: "The election is about George W. Bush and these issues are enough to render him unworthy of any conservative support."

For those who came out in droves to vote for him on November 2, the election was also about George Bush. They came to vote for the "moral values" that they shared with Bush, and for his resolve in the war on terror. If liberals and old-fashioned conservatives could not stomach Bush's evangelical war both on the secular values of the U.S. and on the peoples of the world, many of his fellow citizens saw Bush as their saviour. For them, Bush would not only defend the U.S. from terrorist threats that emanate from outside the U.S., but he also pledged to protect them from the threat to what they call their "moral values". In a 2003 speech, Bush had invoked the "working-wonder power" of the American people. That phrase came from an evangelical hymn that reflects on the power of salvation in Christ, not in mundane values. But the message came across clearly: the President stands on the side of the believers and, as the reactionary among them define the agenda of the believers, Bush will back them all the way.

Four years ago, Bush's adviser Karl Rove told participants at an American Enterprise Institute seminar that the goal of the Bush re-election campaign would be to make sure that all 19 million evangelical Christians who did not vote in 2000 come to the polls in 2004. Rove hired Ralph Reed, former head of the Christian Coalition, to mobilise his contacts and to go after the withheld votes. The effort began to pay off by the summer of 2004 when the National Association of Evangelicals released a report, For the Health of the Nation: An Evangelical Call for Civic Responsibility. "Because Jesus is Lord over every aspect of life," the report noted, evangelicals should take an interest in public policy and vote to enforce their "values" over the polity. These voters came out for Bush and they told their exit pollsters that the issue that brought them out was not their own unemployment or underemployment, or even the loss of their family members in a war of choice. They came to vote for "moral values", for the "character" of George W. Bush.

ROVE, who has been with Bush from the start of his political career in Texas, is an astute electoral strategist. The Bush team understood that it would not win on its economic record, with hundreds of thousands of jobs lost under the Bush administration and with weak social programmes (including health care) now a faint memory. Whereas the Democrats did fight on this plank, they were equally culpable for the economic misery. Kerry's own economic agenda could not address fundamental problems such as unemployment, low wages jobs with no benefits, a chronic crisis for small farmers and industrial workers. To counter Bush, Kerry had to promote the eight Clinton years of "prosperity". But the Clinton period's good news concerned free-trade agreements, fiscal discipline, balanced budgets and cut-backs on the welfare state - hardly the stuff that promotes excitement among a population in economic uncertainty. The Democrats, even as they tried to offer economic populist rhetoric, could not gain much traction despite the many, many publicised corporate scandals and from the corruption of the contracts for the reconstruction of Iraq.

THE two issues that dominated the exit polls, terrorism and moral values, actually had more in common than one might imagine. Bush had pushed his command of the "war on terror" as a crucial reason to re-elect him. Kerry, he claimed, had no plan to deal with terrorism, and he did not understand that Iraq had become the main theatre for that war. Kerry's lack of clarity on the Iraq war, his inarticulate defence of his votes for the war, and his empty calls of multilateralism could not inflame the majority of the population. Certainly 55.4 million people voted for Kerry, but in the context of the presidential deceit that took the country into war, the challenger should have had a landslide. Most of those who turned to Bush live in parts of America that neither got hit in 9/11 nor are likely to be on the terrorist's target lists. Nevertheless, why do they believe that Bush is the man to protect them?

A recent poll showed that just about half the U.S. population believes in the existence of the Devil and a number of people shy of that believe that the world will end soon in a cataclysmic Armageddon. Shortly after the planes struck the World Trade Centre and the Pentagon, the influential reverend and Moral Majority leader Jerry Falwell appeared on a television show hosted by Pat Robertson, former presidential candidate and Christian Coalition leader. They both bemoaned the attack, saw in it the signs of the approaching millennium. Falwell identified the culprits, "The abortionist have got to bear some burden for this because God will not be mocked. And when we destroy 40 million little innocent babies, we make God mad. I really believe that the pagans and the abortionists and the feminists and the gays and lesbians who are actively trying to make that an alternative lifestyle... all of them who have tried to secularise America. I point the finger in their face and say, `You helped this happen'." President Bush, for this sort of logic, is God's representative, to ensure that order is maintained at home and that Americans be saved from external threats.

In 2003, Under-Secretary of Defence Lieutenant-General Jerry Boykin told a "patriotic service" at the Good Shepherd Community Church in Oregon: "Now ask yourself this: why is this man in the White House? The majority of Americans did not vote for him. Why is he there? And I tell you this morning he's in the White House because God put him there for such a time as this. God put him there to lead not only this nation but to lead the world, in such a time as this." Boykin repeated the phrase "such a time as this" which occurs in the Bible (Esther 4:14) to indicate perilous times. Bush needed to be President by God's commandment, for such a time as this.

Bush ran an election campaign that appealed to a very limited definition of values, where the fear of gay marriage and abortion trumped all other issues, even a ransom-sized deficit and a murderous war. Anti-gay ballot initiatives in 11 States, including the crucial state of Ohio, brought out the legions of social conservatives. The Pew Centre for Religion and Public Life released a poll in August that showed 64 per cent of those asked clearly said that "moral values" is their most important issue. The Faith-Based Initiatives (that pummel the state-church separation), the ban on "partial birth" abortions, the position against gay marriage, the refusal to fund stem-cell research, the "crusade" against Islam and Bush's personal story of transformation and forgiveness appealed to a population that is piously fundamentalist. In addition, the Bush administration has provided millions of dollars to churches to promote marriage and sexual abstinence, sent Christianity's version of the Taliban to represent the U.S. at any U.N. conferences on population or sexuality, prevented delivery of U.S. aid to groups that conduct family planning around the planet, and even helped erect an enormous cross in California's Mojave Desert.

If Bush is the best leader for such a time as this, then everything he says must be true. Contrary to every available analysis, and even to the statements of both Bush and Vice-President Dick Cheney in the waning days of the campaign, three quarters of the people who voted for Bush believe that Saddam Hussein had an intimate relationship with both Al Qaeda and 9/11. The vessel of God might speak in tongues, but he knows better.

IF the Democratic Party had crafted an agenda of economic and social justice, it may have roused a population that feels imposed upon by outside forces. Had the Democratic Party been able to name these outside forces as the tentacles of corporate America that have destroyed family farms, locked out industrial workers, and transformed free education into military combat, then the election might have produced a landslide. However, in a cruel twist of fate, the Republican Party, and social conservatives, have been able to assemble the class resentments of the population into a programme against liberalism. The Republican Party is now the champion of both the super rich (who benefit from its tax cuts) and the white middle and working class (who resent their social subordination). Genuine grievances against social immobility are fashioned as anger at gays and lesbians, feminists and racial minorities (including immigrants). Commentator Thomas Frank, who wrote the timely What's the Matter With Kansas? How Conservatives Won the Heart of America, shows how the Republicans have framed the "ever-powerful subject of social class. They are a way for Republicans to speak on behalf of the forgotten man without causing any problems for their core big-business constituency".

Democrats continue to rely upon the most subordinated sections for their votes, the working-class, immigrants, gays and lesbians, people of colour, and others. These are the bare bones of the Democratic coalition. But, as is frequently pointed out, the Democrats entirely take advantage of their "base," and they spend their time going after a mythical "white man" who has generally come to see the Democrats as liberal elitists. This is why Kerry had to don hunting gear and go after geese, and this is why his military record had to be so much on display. But, because the Democrats bear as much onus for the loss of jobs and for the general disarray of economic hopes of the people, the social constituencies of the Democratic Party remain steadfast for lack of options. The party itself has, since the late 1980s, become the mass front of the Democratic Leadership Council (DLC), a fiscal conservative organisation that vetted and crafted the past three Democratic presidential candidates (Clinton, Gore and Kerry).

The DLC does not represent the views of the base of the party, whose class critique is far fiercer than anything that is allowed at the top of the ticket. If the Republicans have been able to talk about class in terms of the "moral values" of the people versus the elites, the Democrats talk about class in terms of the need to help those who have not made it into the middle class. Neither do a frontal criticism of the unequal power structure. In that case, the Republicans are able to be far more emotive than the Democrats. As proof of this, 42 per cent of those with low incomes and 36 per cent of union members turned out for Bush.

REPORTS stream in from many of the swing States on potential electoral fraud. Ballots uncounted, voters with complaints about being denied access to polling booths and machines that almost always seem to have over-counted for Bush. By the middle of the election night, it seemed as if Kerry had carried Ohio, with exit polls clearly showing that women voted for him by a 6 per cent margin, while men voted for him by a 2 point margin. How could he have lost? As journalist Greg Palast put it: "Unless a third gender voted in Ohio, Kerry took the State. So what's going on here? Answer: the exit polls are accurate. Pollsters ask, `Who did you vote for?' Unfortunately they don't ask the crucial question, `Was your vote counted?' The voters don't know." Despite their slogan that "every vote must count", Senator Kerry hastily conceded the day after the election.

The Democratic Party, which suffered losses in the House of Representatives and in the Senate as well, quickly began to blame its politicians who had helped make gay marriage an issue. The one section of the party that stood for something now came in for attack. The DLC's people wanted the party to move further to the right. Others warn that this is a recipe for disaster. The Green Party earned only 100,000 votes, while Ralph Nader on the independent line picked up about 500,000 votes: a miserable showing. The anti-war movement has already begun discussions about the way forward, perhaps for the creation of a genuinely independent bloc that is not subsumed by the Democratic Party. The United for Peace and Justice released a message that concluded: "Our long-term hope lies in the grassroots upsurge, and to win, we need to take the long-term view."

Bush has taken the result as a mandate. Conservative political guru Richard Viguerie warned the Republicans: "Make no mistake - conservative Christians and `value voters' won this election for George W. Bush and Republicans in Congress. It's crucial that the Republican leadership not forget this - as much as some will try." Viguerie and others are calling for a revolution, for a Supreme Court that will ban abortion and a government that will prevent gay marriage and the like. Bush himself agreed: "We will uphold our deepest values of family and faith." Just as he gave the social conservatives red meat, he also promoted more economic policies that will increase the resentments of the disenfranchised. "We will continue our economic progress. We will reform our outdated tax code. We will strengthen Social Security for the next generation." Bush wants to end the national pension plan, give the money to each citizen so that they might invest it on the stock market: in other words, he plans to erode the ethic of social solidarity promoted by the pension plan for an investment in the lottery of the stock market. These policies will further the agenda of Reagan's budget director, David Stockman, to "starve the beast" of the welfare state. When the social nets are destroyed, all that will be left is religious organisation, which is exactly what the religious conservatives want.