Second coming

PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA on stage with first lady Michelle Obama and daughters Malia and Sasha at his election night party on November 7 in Chicago.-CHRIS CARLSON/AP

Democrat Barack Obama wins a second term as the U.S. President thanks to the hard and regressive stances of the Republicans. But will the second term be any different from the first?

I. The Outcome Could have Been Worse

Election night in the United States on November 6 drifted along, with returns coming in from the east to the west. The map was deceptive: vast areas began to be coloured red, particularly in the south and in the centre of the country. These went into the Republican column. Only 400,000 voted in Montana to give its three electoral college (E.C.) votes to the Republican Mitt Romney, but geographically tiny New Jerseys over four million voters gave its 14 E.C. votes to the Democrat Barack Obama. Montana is the fourth largest State, sprawling over almost 400,000 square kilometres, while New Jersey takes up a mere 22,000 sq km; but Montanas wide open spaces houses fewer than a million people while New Jersey has nine million people. If elections in the U.S. were won by acreage, then Romney would be the President-elect today.

Obama won 303 E.C. votes to Romneys 206, with an advantage of just about three million individual votes. By U.S. standards, this is a landslide. As usual, the populous coastal States of the east (New York, Pennsylvania, Virginia, Massachusetts) and of the west (California, Oregon, Washington) remained reliably Democratic, whereas the old Confederacy and the sparsely peopled States of the Great Plains (Nebraska, the Dakotas, Wyoming) went to the Republicans. The classic battleground States of the elections since 2000 (Florida and Ohio) gave their E.C. votes to Obama in a stunning repudiation of Romneys frequent trips to them.

The pollsters and pundits had expected a close election. In the end, it was anything but.

I asked Noam Chomsky what he thought of the election result. His answer was swift, When Obama won the Nobel Peace Prize, I was informed by a phone call from a Norwegian reporter who asked for a comment. The first thought that came to mind, and what I said, was that there had been worse choices. Same with the elections. There could have been worse outcomes, in fact much worse.

II. Demography as destiny

The demographic shifts in the U.S. no longer favour the Republicans. As the inevitable began to sink in on the pro-Republican Fox News Channel, the Republican consultant who had worked on Ronald Reagans 1984 campaign, Ed Rollins, mused that it would not be possible for the Republicans to win a presidential election if they rely so predictably on the southern white male vote. Sitting next to him, the Republican adviser A.B. Stoddard wistfully acknowledged that the Republicans had a problem with women voters, as their standard-bearers made outrageous comments about rape and womens rights. Attitudes in the U.S. towards womens rights, immigration rights, gay rights and civil rights decidedly favour the kind of liberal tolerance proposed by the Democrats, and shrink from the harsh, even cruel, posture of the Republicans. Rollins and Stoddard grudgingly recognised this, although neither seemed to have a formula for the advancement of their party. They fear that the knives will come out for a drawn-out civil war for control of a new Republican Party.

The formula for the Republican base has been God, Guns and Gays. Questions of access to abortion and the rights of the unborn riled up the religious, mainly evangelical and Catholic voters, who became stalwarts of the Right. Allied to this agenda was a firm refusal to acknowledge the growing social acceptance of gay rights, including gay marriage and social benefits for the partners in a gay relationship. The antiquated morality of the Republicans led them to charges of hypocrisy, when one of their own was caught in adultery or in a gay relationship, and led them towards a vicious misogynistic politics. Two Senate hopefuls, Todd Akin (Missouri) and Richard Mourdock (Indiana), suffered defeats in otherwise favourable rightward political States, largely because of their boneheaded comments on rapewith Akin defending legitimate rape and Mourdock pointing out that abortion should not be allowed for rape victims since it was something that God intended to happen. With women forming 54 per cent of the U.S. electorate now, it was decisive that 55 per cent of them chose Obama while only 44 per cent went for Romney. The mandate for this election was in favour of womens rights: it will be hard for any administration or party to persist with an anti-woman agenda if it hopes to have a future.

Equally, the logic of social conservatism, the loam of the Republican Party, had hardened into a politics of hatred against illegal immigrants. Romney provocatively called for such a stringent set of state controls that would make undocumented people self deport. He endorsed the new regime put in place in Arizona, considered outside the mainstream in terms of its policy to delegitimise the undocumented. Since most people of Latin American descent (Latinos) identify strongly with the immigration debate, and since Latinos are the fastest growing demographic, it was fated that the Republicans would not benefit at the polls for their cruel politics. A remarkable 75 per cent of Latinos voted for Obama, and in the decisive areas around Miami (Florida), that vote delivered the battleground States to the Democrats. A premonition of the future comes in the county breakdown along the border with Mexico, where the reliable Republican States of Texas and Arizona nonetheless saw Democratic blue leaking in. Romney won Texas by a handy 57 to 41 margin, but in the counties along the border such as Hidalgo, Presidio, Starr, and Webb, where the Latino majority is growing, Obama prevailed by 70 to 30. If this is the future for Texas, then the Republicans might well lose their grip on the State.

Latinos are one part of the non-white electorate. African Americans vote at 90 per cent levels for the Democrats, and Asian Americans at 70 per cent (South Asian Americans at 80 per cent). There is no hope for a Republican breakthrough in these communities. The white supremacist agenda of the Republican Party, couched in the language of liberty and merit, does not fool the non-white sectionsand the advancement of a few from amongst them (such as the South Asian American Governors Nikki Haley and Bobby Jindal) has made little to no impact on their communities.

If Obama delivers an immigration reform package in his second term, as he promised, he will cement the Democratic gains among Latinos and other communities that still see themselves as part of the immigrant world.

On the ballot, the social issues broke in a liberal direction. Two States (Maine and Maryland) approved gay marriage, and Minnesota blocked an anti-gay marriage amendment. Several States allowed medical marijuana (Colorado for recreational use) to be sold by regulated shops. These are indications of a generally tolerant and liberal direction for U.S. society. Such toleration will always benefit the Democrats, who by temperament are not as yoked to the suffocating 1950s ideals of American life promoted by the Republicans. That glance backward dooms the Republicans to gradual obscurity.

III. Parties of finance

One of the curious facets of the U.S. electoral process is that, unlike in the Global South, the richer you are, the more likely it is that you will vote. The poor vote at very low rates for a host of reasons: disenchantment with the fruits of elections, lack of public transport to get to the polls, deliberate attempts at voter suppression by the Right, and the imperatives of waged work (elections are held on Tuesday, a working day).

An early number shows that only 56 per cent of eligible voters went to the polls to re-elect President Obama, with 118 million people voting this time as opposed to 131 million in 2008. Among the 40 per cent of the 91 million eligible voters who did not come to the polls, most are from the poorest sections of society. As journalism professor Robert McChesney put it, Voter participation increases step by step with income.

The absence of the poor at the polls linked to the presence of vast amounts of money from the very rich into the electoral process ($2 billion in this election) makes it unnecessary for the candidates to raise seriously the questions of livelihood and employment.

Both Romney and Obama batted around the job figures during the debates, but neither seriously laid out a plan to deal with the evisceration of manufacturing and union jobs, the foreclosure crisis and the increased deprivation of the poor in terms of well-being. Strikingly, States with the highest poverty rates (the Old South) voted for Romney, the epitome of the super-rich.

Liberal stalwarts against the power of finance won their seats to the Senate, the upper house in the bicameral chamber. Elizabeth Warren (Massachusetts), Sherrod Brown (Ohio) and Bernie Sanders (Vermont) lead the pack. But they will neither command the Senate nor will they have any impact on the President. Elizabeth Warren helped write the law that set up the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, but when nominated to lead the Bureau by Obama she was resisted by his own administration (led by Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner). Her party is committed to neoliberal economic policies, including the need for Austerity with a Human Face (as opposed to the Republicans, who would eschew the Human Face).

In late October, Obama sat down with the editorial board of Des Moines Register, laying out for them his plans for a second term. On top of the list was a grand bargain with the Republicans to save the country from going over a fiscal cliff. Ten days before, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) in Tokyo urged the U.S. to solve its debt crisis.

A looming deadlock between the two parties would set off legally mandated tax increases and federal spending cuts in the early months of 2013. This would shrink the U.S. economy and plunge it into a structural crisis that might be more catastrophic than the 2008 credit crisis. Obama told the Des Moines Register that the negotiations with the Republicans will probably be messy. It wont be pleasant. But I am absolutely confident that we can get what is the equivalent of the grand bargain that essentially Ive been offering to the Republicans for a very long time, which is $2.50 worth of cuts for every dollar in spending, and work to reduce the costs of our health care programmes. Obama felt that the negotiations could meet the $4 trillion in deficit reductions, and we can stabilise our deficit-to-GDP ratio in a way that is really going to be a good foundation for long-term growth.

Doug Henwood, editor of Left Business Observer, told me that Obama was under tremendous pressure from the establishment to agree to some kind of budgetary grand bargain, which always means cutting Social Security and Medicare. And he might actually agree with that agendahe did, after all, appoint the Simpson-Bowles deficit commission even though he didnt have to. In the Des Moines discussion, Obama said that the bargain he would re-offer the Republicans would substantially meet the recommendations of Simpson-Bowles National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform, which was essentially an austerity programme for the vast bulk of the population.

Jeffrey St. Clair, editor of Counterpunch, notes that Obama is a closeted agent of austerity. As St. Clair forecasts it, In a few months, the President will reach out to his old pal Paul Ryan to take a stroll across that tragic terrain known as the common ground in pursuit of those twin obsessions of the elites: deficit reduction and entitlement reform. In the name of political conciliation, Obama will piously move to slash away at Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid and the last frail fabrics of the federal social welfare programmes. These savage cuts will be enthusiastically cheered by the mainstream press, Wall Street and the Washington establishment.

The banks will once more be delivered a safe harbour bailed out in the Obama first termand provided with a new foundation to continue their untrammelled shenanigans. As Smith College professor Lisa Armstrong put it, the day after the election, structural adjustment policies come to the United States.

IV. Parties of war

Foreign policy emerged as a focal point in the U.S. presidential debates, but here the disagreements were mild. Both Obama and Romney took the view that the U.S. must retain its Siamese relationship with Israel, and that both would be tough on Iran. China came in for its ritual dunking, with Obama and Romney promising to force its leadership to reconfigure its currency to the advantage of the U.S. This was bravado, and a bit ridiculous. Both Iran and China will have a new leader by 2013 and Obama failed to take advantage of the debate to reach out to the new leaderships, to seek a new foundation for what will inevitably become a multipolar world. Instead, the presidential debates seemed mired in the 1980s, with an anachronistic sensibility that U.S. primacy would be revived and that it was to the U.S. that the world looked for leadership. A gasp of relief emerged from Latin America when it was known that Obama had won. After all, Obama, unlike Romney, said nothing about the hemisphere during the campaign. From Venezuela to Chile, the Latin Americans like being ignored. They are crafting their own continent minus the meddlesome fingers of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and the U.S. Treasury Department.

Unless the U.S. begins to dismantle its sense of unipolar primacy, with the need to maintain military power across the planet through its bases and to direct and determine the path of countries far and wide, there will be little change in the tenor of U.S. foreign policy. President George W. Bushs faux rustic manner fitted his blustery exaggerations of U.S. power, sending warships and bombers hither and yon to cut down adversaries real and imagined. President Obama is more sober, but his strategy is no less deadly. The bluster is buried behind a more measured tone, but the drones and the Special Forces, the warships and the bombers are utilised with as much vigour. Not hours after he won the re-election, Obama authorised drone strikes on Yemen. The hope that Obama will rethink this technique, which the United Nations is now investigating once more for its legitimacy, seems to have deflated.

V. Fate of the Progressives

More than half the U.S. population routinely tells pollsters that their country needs a third party. And yet, come presidential elections, the voters avoid the third party choices for the two-horse race. This year, the Libertarian Party earned just over a million votes and the Green Party about 400,000. Other parties fell far short. Progressive blocs remain with the Democratic Party despite its drift to the right on issues of finance and war. It is the Democratic Partys tendency to be modestly liberal on social issues that saves it from a progressive exodus, and of course the appalling choice of the Republicans. This is the framework known as the lesser evil. Black Agenda Reports Glen Ford argues, however, that the Democrats are not the lesser evil as much as the more effective evil. It is Obama who will be able to deliver austerity level cuts, with the liberals first hesitant and then resigned as they try to appear responsible in the face of the obduracy of the Republicans and of the economic trials of the U.S.

Medea Benjamin of the activist group Code Pink tells me that this time there should be no honeymoon for Obama. It is time, she says, for students to fight for affordable education, immigrants to push for real reforms, environmentalists to address climate chaos, and peace movements to stop wars and drone attacks. Weve got to push Obama and Congress to cut Pentagon spending instead of cutting social services, and to invest in a green economy that can put people to work and heal the planet at the same time. The idea that Obama can be pushed enlivens progressivism. The failure of the third parties to make any headway offers few other alternatives.

Obama has often said that his presidency can only fulfil the peoples tasks if there is a mass movement to push him. In his acceptance speech, Obama noted, The role of citizens in our democracy does not end with your vote. America has never been about what can be done for us. Its about what can be done by us together through the hard and frustrating, but necessary work of self-government. But if mass movements gather and push his administration, does he have the progressive will to act on those demands? This is in doubt.

Obamas record shows him to be a cautious moderate, a pragmatist, which in the context of a policy space saturated with conservative ideas leads to default conservatism. There are, however, indications that on some issues mass social struggle has been able to move his hand. One of these examples is that of the undocumented youth whose brave activism pushed the Obama administration to acknowledge their right to exist in the U.S. (although at the same time his administration has deported a million people).

GRIT TVs Laura Flanders told me: The young immigrants made themselves a force to be reckoned with in this election. People lead; leaders follow. It will require the irrepressible force of powerful, passionate social movements that believe in themselves as much as they believe in any politician, if we are to force the ship of state off its conventional course, and if we are to live up to the determination, bravery and smarts that voters showed this election.

There is no lack of ideas. Julie Matthaei, professor of economics at Wellesley College and part of the U.S. Solidarity Economy Networks, lays out some of this vision, rooted as it is in the Occupy dynamic: We must deepen the growing movement to occupy our economy, which is challenging economic practices and institutions in new, transformative ways. For example, there is the occupation of unused factories, land, and homes, there is the collective refusal to pay student loans, and there is the use of worker cooperatives as a strategy for job creation. These are three ideas that emerge out of the activism that has flourished over the course of the past year. It is far from the kind of programme envisaged by the Democratic victors, but it is what they will hear about as the new administration takes power in January 2013.