By Steve Painter
The most surprising thing about Ross Perot's campaign for the United States presidency was not his withdrawal last week, but the fact that a megalomaniac billionaire was able to win the support of millions. In a few weeks, Perot rocketed to 30% support in the polls, and even at the time of his withdrawal he still had around 20%. That says more about the state of US politics than anything else that is likely to happen before the elections on November 3.
As with all US elections, it won't make a lot of difference whether the Republicans' George Bush or the Democrats' Bill Clinton eventually emerges as the new president. In the wake of the Los Angeles riots, Bush is trailing in the polls, the triumphal hype of the Gulf War now well and truly buried in the statistics of recession. But that could change quickly; Bush also trailed at early stages of the 1988 elections.
The truth is, US elections have very little to do with real life. Presidential campaigns cost tens of millions, and are invariably dominated by professional politicians (usually rich if not very rich).
While images of campaign rallies and slick, white politicians will dominate the media in the coming months, one fact will be very rarely mentioned: up to half of those US citizens who are eligible to vote won't bother. For some, this may be simply because they're not interested in politics, but for many others it will be because they know there's no real choice. It's a safe bet that the tens of thousands who rioted in Los Angeles and other cities a few months ago are not looking to the elections to solve the problems confronting them.
Who, then, will dominate the US elections? Writing prior to Perot's withdrawal in the July 10 New Statesman & Society, Alexander Cockburn and Andrew Kopkind summed up the Democrat and Perot campaigns:
- The Democrat candidates represent a new generation. They would be the first leaders of the US born after World War II. But they don't represent anything new. "It's difficult to convey the feel of the Clinton culture", write Cockburn and Kopkind. "Like the Kennedy culture 30 years ago, it is a stir fry of blatant self-promotion, unexamined idealism, cynical sophistication, suspect intellectual certainty and an arrogant race and class snobbery. It comes on as hip and liberal, but panders to the right (Clinton's embrace of the death penalty) and abhors any person or movement to its left. It is suffused with a gestural sentimentality about racial harmony, but its commitment is to white power and privilege. Its adherents protested against the Vietnam War, if they were old enough, but they hold no internationalist values and, like Clinton, are ever-willing to sacrifice principle to 'political viability'."
- "Perot ... is a billionaire entrepreneur, with all the disadvantages of Richard Nixon (another Navy man) — paranoia, vindictiveness, intolerance, opportunism — and none of his cynically brilliant political vision ... His politico-economic stance is instantly recognisable to anyone who interviewed hi-tech entrepreneurs in the boom years. Fatted on government contracts, they combined vivid anti-regulatory, anti-Washington passion with commensurate zeal for protectionism, the whole hypocritical stew larded with thunderings against the idleness of the Fortune 500."
Faced with the choice between Clinton, Perot and Bush, Cockburn and Kopkind urged Jesse Jackson to break away from the Democrats and run an independent campaign based on mobilising some of the millions who won't vote in November. However, Jackson has made it clear he won't do that. While critical of the Democrats' choice of two Southern yuppies as their presidential and vice presidential candidates, Jackson is staying with the party.
The choice facing US citizens in November will be George Bush, the former CIA head and Danforth ("potatoe") Quayle, on the one hand, and Bill Clinton and Al Gore on the other. Clinton, as governor of Arkansas, presides over one of the most segregationist US states, and has promoted unrestricted economic growth with disastrous consequences for the environment. Gore, one of the few Democrat supporters of the Gulf War, and a rabid Zionist, is relatively good on environmental questions.