Election 2002
What the Democrats Can Expect
by Bryan Zepp Jamieson

Nov. 2, 2002 -- Mt. Shasta (zeppscommentaries.com) -- Next Tuesday, there's an election. You may have heard about it. It's been in quite a few of the papers, and there have been one or two ads on TV.

I think the Democrats will do fairly well. I looked over the races this past week, and I think they are going to pick up about a dozen seats in the House, and four, perhaps even five in the Senate. (The North Carolina race with Liddy Dole has suddenly become a toss-up).

There isn't a reason why the Democrats shouldn't do well, actually. For all the babble in the Corporate Media about how the country is so evenly divided philosophically, the fact is the Democrats have a 10% edge in number of voters registered, a large enough edge that they would, if voting patterns matched registration patterns, have about 300 seats in the House, and 65 in the Senate. And all but own the White House.

The trouble, of course, is that the poor and the left have been sitting elections out. To the left, claims that Clinton was a "liberal" are a bad joke; the man, after all, attacked the poor with his welfare "reform," signed the monstrous Defense of Marriage act, and led the Constitutional disgrace known as "the war on drugs." The poor get to choose between party "A" which wants the working poor to co-pay 50% on prescription drugs, and party "B" which wants them to co-pay 40%, and they can't afford either, so why vote for either the party of Class Warfare or the party of Class Warfare light? Yes, Clinton was better than Putsch, but that's a bit like saying that Putin is better than Stalin. Aside from fighting for the environment and most civil rights -- issues that in rational societies wouldn't even need defending -- he was a moderate rightist.

But this year, Democratic voters are more galvanized. There's a number of reasons for this, and the Corporate Media is only discussing two of them -- war and the economy -- and glossing those over.

The Peace Rallies on October 26th attracted at least 400,000 Americans. Did you know that? It took the media by surprise, and they tried to blow it off. AP, which used to be a news service, seemed to be the only American news source that knew there were rallies planned, and issued one of their famous pre-written "news stories" and distributed early on the 26th reporting that hundreds turned up for an anti-war rally in Washington, DC. Then they amended it to say "thousands." Then "ten thousand." The most reliable number I've heard is 125,000. Event organizers say it was around 200,000. It was a lot of people, and far more than the media was expecting. San Francisco attracted at least 80,000, and a half-dozen other big cities had big rallies.

And I'm not even counting the smaller places that had rallies. Five hundred turned out in Medford, Oregon. Most campuses had gatherings.

Even Republicans have to realize that when we actually attaq, the protests are going to be much, much larger.

The media gave it coverage the day after, and then never mentioned it again. Americans are supposed to be numb and alienated from politics, and the media wants to report news from the big guys, and not from the people who buy their product. And of course, the companies that own the media don't want to talk about insurrections. Bad for business.

People are worried about the economy, and with good reason. It's being reported by the media, but characteristically, it's dwelling on the effect it will have on the business community more than on the consumer. But the consumer isn't blowing it off just because CNN is dwelling on what it might do to bond yields; consumer confidence hit a nine-year low last week, the worst it's been since before the Clinton miracle. Unemployment went up again this week, to 5.7%, and the market was up on reports that the Fed would make an emergency reduction of interest rates by a half percent. That will put the prime discount rate at or below the rate of inflation, a severe danger signal.

Of course, if Putsch follows though on his mad schemes to wage holy war against the Islamic world, "American prosperity," for 90% of Americans, will be a bad joke.

The sheer awfulness of the Putsch junta has galvanized the left. One reason the Republicans are putting so much effort into trying to shame Democrats over the Senator Paul Wellstone service is because what they saw there genuinely frightened them. C-SPAN ran the three-hour show several times, and thousands of bootleg videotapes have been making the rounds. The Wellstone death has been a rallying cry, and focal point for the left, which for too long has been excluded from having a voice in American politics by the aggressiveness of the right and the weakness of the Democrats. The far right made a tactical error with their disinformation campaign stating that Democrats killed Wellstone; not only did it remind people of what swine the far right are, but it got them to wondering why the frantic arm-waving campaign. There are questions concerning the Wellstone crash, and while there's nothing solid to cause anyone to suppose it was an assassination, the behavior of the Ollie North/Rush Limbaugh goons has people wondering.

The media didn't mention that Wellstone got a big boost from standing up to Putsch on Iraq, and they haven't mentioned that the majority of Democrats and that handful of brave Republicans who also did so all benefited from doing so with their voter base. When only 27% of the public thinks a unilateral invasion of Iraq is a good idea, it's pretty silly to pretend that voting against doing such is political suicide. Nevertheless, that's what the media, on behalf of the American right, has been trying to do.

"Wag the Dog" has failed, and isn't it refreshing to see evidence that the American public aren't just cattle to be towed about by the rings in their noses? The Republicans have to be going nuts. The texts said that if you invent an outside threat, and accuse anyone who questions that of treason, the people will follow you because the people are idiots.

Maybe those old texts are wrong.

Another right wing shibboleth bit the dust in this campaign. Democrats are supposed to be ashamed of Clinton and Gore, presumably because they caused the right so much inconvenience. And it's happened far too frequently that Republicans have bellowed that Democrats shouldn't use Clinton or Gore in campaigns because they would only hurt them, and Democrats have cringed, apologized, scuttled away and been puzzled when they lost.

I see in today's news that Gore and Clinton are both in Florida, campaigning vigorously for McBride against Jebediah, the Banana Republican. Jeb Bush went into the weekend leading by six points, a surprisingly small margin, and both Gore and Clinton carry a lot of clout. We could see a big upset there.

I guess the Democrats have decided to stop taking right wing advice on how to run their campaigns. Maybe there's hope.

If Democratic turnout is high, the left is going to expect the Democrats to stop surrendering and put up a fight. They are going to demand that Senators accept ONLY qualified and impartial candidates for the Supreme Courts and lesser courts, and not ideological disgraces like Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas. They are going to demand that Democrats work for universal health care, for strong worker's rights, for strong protection of personal privacy, the environment, the safety, availability and accessibility of water, power, communications and medical care. Above all, they want Democrats to support Clean Campaign laws that will greatly reduce the influence of massive international corporations and other well-heeled pressure groups who have all but stolen our government from us.

That's the price tag the left wants: that the Democrats stop trying to appease the unappeasable, and start showing some backbone.

It's the Democrats' last and best chance. It's our last and best chance.

Tuesday, vote as if your life depended upon it.

It does.

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