The Elections: Talk of Change Means More of the Same

by Joe Auciello / October 2008

The selection of Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin as the Republican vice-presidential candidate gave a jumpstart to John McCain’s White House bid. A USA Today/Gallup Poll taken shortly after the Republican National Convention showed a nine-point jump in popularity for McCain-Palin among female voters, reversing the advantage Democratic Party nominee Barack Obama had gained following the Democrats’ convention.

An ABC-News poll reported a 20% jump in support for McCain among white women. Simply put, Palin took a sizable chunk of Obama’s supporters away from him and brought undecided voters into the McCain camp.

More significantly, Palin’s presence on the Republican ticket burnished McCain’s image as a reformer who vows to return to Washington and enact an agenda of change.

The notion of the GOP candidates as radical reformers is a thought too bizarre to have considered possible. After all, the Republicans are the party of George Bush, whose policies the present campaign endorses, even if they think it prudent to make little mention of the president.

McCain-Palin enthusiastically support and will continue the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Palin has recently consigned a son to this hopeless, ill-conceived, and immoral enterprise.

What’s more, in recent interviews Palin has suggested the U.S. could go to war against Russia to protect Georgia, would invade Pakistan in pursuit of terrorists, and should support an Israeli attack on Iran. In an interview with ABC-News anchor Charles Gibson, Palin may have been unable to define the Bush doctrine, but she certainly signaled her intention to carry it out, given the chance.

Palin is also a social conservative, a woman who opposes abortion rights even in cases of incest and rape. She opposes gay marriage and is sympathetic to having public schools teach the anti-scientific theories of creationism. These are touchstone issues for the religious right, and Palin has helped generate enthusiasm for McCain among the most reactionary flank of his party, especially the Evangelicals.

Gov. Palin has claimed to have special insight into the will of God, who, by her account, appears to be a Republican who wants not only a U.S. victory in Iraq, but also a gas pipeline originating from Alaska to the lower 48 states. Both, she has said, are part of “God’s plan.”

Palin is not sure that human beings have created global warming, but, despite the lack of a human cause, she does not blame God for these harmful changes in the environment. It could just be “part of the cyclical nature of our planet.”

When questioned directly about her God-inspired statements, Palin responded in double-speak. It’s not that God is on our side in the Iraq war, she said; we must pray and hope that we are on God’s side. Either way, it seems that the real Commander-in-Chief is not one that voters have or can elect.

Gov. Palin’s presence in the race also allows the McCain campaign to exploit a racial advantage. The state of race relations in the U.S. today is such that no reputable person can declare an unwillingness to vote for a Black man as the country’s president. Still, while racial prejudice is less openly acknowledged, it certainly exists.

Now, with Palin on the GOP ticket, the “whites only” voters have an acceptable excuse: they oppose Obama because they are actually “pro-woman.” These days racism is no longer cloaked in the white sheets of the Klan; now racism hides behind the skirt of phony feminism.

Yet, despite flimsy qualifications, the public enthusiasm for Palin is authentic. Part of Palin’s attraction to voters is that she, like most women, raises a family and works for a living. At the Republican convention, she referred to herself as “just your average hockey mom.” She is a wife, a mother of five children, and a state governor. On this count, as a woman who has accomplished much, even her Democratic opponents have grudgingly granted her some credit.

But the key element of Palin’s success with voters is her self-proclaimed description as the candidate of conservative reform, a politician willing to take on big government and big business, someone who will straighten out Washington and Wall Street. She boasts that she fights corruption in high places—even in her own party—on behalf of everyday people.

This is a story line that has, so far, read quite well and lent McCain the credibility he sorely needs. It’s not easy to talk tough against the old boy network and the Washington elite when the candidate is an old boy who spends most of his time in the Senate in Washington. Voters were not buying.

The Obama campaign had built itself up on a slogan of change, a strategy that for months left McCain struggling to find traction. Further, the selection of Senator Joseph Biden, chairman of the powerful Senate Foreign Relations Committee, as Obama’s running mate beefed up the perceived weakness in the Democratic ticket.

McCain was forced into a desperate decision when he announced his vice-presidential candidate. Enter the relatively unknown Sarah Palin, 44, who quickly emerged as the anti-Obama, and a public relations triumph for her party. Young, female, energetic, articulate, appealing, she effectively countered all Obama’s strengths, especially when she pledged “to challenge the status quo, to serve the common good, and to leave this nation better than we found it.”

But Palin’s image, for all its marketing success, rests on a slender record and on some dubious distinctions. Palin’s limited reform agenda has cost her nothing—in fact, she has benefited from it. Palin’s 2006 gubernatorial campaign ousted the incumbent Republican fat cat and put her into office. Palin was simply able to read the writing on the wall.

According to a New York Times account: “Ms. Palin’s storming of the gates was helped by the taint of the Alaskan money culture gone awry, as federal authorities investigated oil-cash corruption in the State Legislature in 2006...” (Sept. 4, 2008).

What the McCain camp praises as “the courage to take on her own party” turned out to be a good way to get elected. As Palin said at the Republican convention, “In politics, there are some candidates who use change to promote their careers.”

Nor did her work on the Alaskan Gas and Oil Conservation Commission do her any harm. She did assist an investigation that ousted one particularly crooked official, but corporate interests are served quite well without individual corruption. Otherwise, business proceeded as usual, the business, that is, of reinforcing the predominance of big energy.

As New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman summed up, “Indeed, Palin’s much ballyhooed confrontations with the oil industry have all been about who should get more of the windfall profits, not how to end our addiction [to foreign oil]” (Sept. 3, 2008).

More revealing is what Sarah Palin did not say. Her threats at the Republican National Convention against the “entrenched interests and power brokers” could have begun that very night. She had only to look up at the rafters where sat, as ABC-News correspondent Brian Ross put it, “Republican royalty” and to pledge to end their control of the very convention where she spoke.

The fact is that the major party conventions are bought and paid for by big business. According to Congress Watch, a non-profit public interest organization, “approximately 80% of the estimated $112 million needed to hold the [Democratic and Republican] conventions will come from private donors, primarily large corporations.”

In return for these corporate donations, according to Congress Watch, party officials offer corporate executives “prime advertising space at the convention and exclusive access to influential politicians. The greater the contribution, the greater the advertising and access opportunities.”

Sarah Palin might also have pointed out that this river of corporate cash is tax deductible, so that, by the bottom line, corporate influence is paid for by millions of taxpayers who do not even know that they fund the privileges of the mega-companies.

In fact, while Sarah Palin spoke to the Republican delegates about integrity and bravery, former Republican lobbyist Jack Abramoff was being sentenced for the crime of scheming to corrupt Congress. In a rare moment of candor, Abramoff said, “So much that happens in Washington stretches the envelope, skirts the spirit of the law, and lives in the loopholes…”

If Sarah Palin possessed even a spoonful of the honesty she claimed for herself, she could have pointed out that loopholes where parasites like Abramoff lived were deliberately created when “reform” legislation was passed. That’s a statement that would have shaken the rafters.

Gov. Palin could have gone on to point out that, according to a Government Accountability Office report published only a few weeks before, two-thirds of all U.S. corporations did not pay taxes between 1989 and 2005. She might have added that John McCain proposes reducing the corporate tax rate by ten percent.

There is so much that Sarah Palin should have said, but she did not. McCain-Palin are no standard bearers for progress and change. They are the representatives of the incumbent party who, along with their Democratic rivals, have given the nation a fractured economy and an unending war. All of their proposals only amount to more of the same.

Voting for these candidates only means switching new players for old in the same game. That’s the meaning of McCain-Palin and Obama-Biden. Real change requires a fundamental break with the Democrats and Republicans and all parties of the capitalist class. Real change is the necessary fight to create a new system and a new society free from the domination of the rich.

That system is socialism: where the vast majority of Americans build a future of peace and prosperity. It may be hard to achieve; it may take more effort than pressing a lever in a ballot box, but it is the one cause worthy of a lifetime’s effort and hope.