Election Series, No. 7
This article continues our online series of election-year commentaries by American and international writers. We welcome your response to any of the articles, and, with your permission, will post some of them as commentaries in their own right. The series will run until shortly before Election Day.
No. 7—September 30, 2008
Has the Financial Crisis Rescued the Election?
by Timothy Sherratt
If some Rip Van Winkle had fallen asleep in 1988 to awaken twenty years later amidst the euphoria that greeted Governor Sarah Palin’s acceptance of the Republican vice-presidential nomination, he would have detected a disturbing familiarity. In that sorry campaign, the candidates debated who was more patriotic and tougher on crime. Real issues scarcely got a look in.
It’s not flags and furloughs this time. But in the forty-five minutes it took for the Alaska governor to accept her nomination as Senator John McCain’s running mate, expressive indicators of American-ness once again took center stage—the challenges of child raising, of everyday struggles to “make it,” of ordinary patriotism, of deep instincts for trusting “people like me,” of suspicion towards elites. Would real issues get bumped again?
But as quickly as the Palin phenomenon appeared, it was, in turn, bumped from the news and the blogs by the collapse of Freddie, Fannie, AIG, and Lehman Brothers, and by the prospects of a massive government rescue of the financial system.
What the financial crisis may be doing, in fact, is rescuing the election.
Americans hate politics, E.J. Dionne reminded us a few years back. When called on to make political choices, citizens distrust political institutions and are repelled by all that is partisan, negative, cynical, and abstract. They prefer to consult a more intimate universe instead—wallets, friends, workplaces, families, and communities. The really striking feature of the present election contest is not how aberrant it is, but how well it reflects elemental American instincts.
In the first eight months of the year, Senator Barack Obama won the Democratic nomination battle by paying close attention to these instincts. He promised to transcend the politics that brought America the Iraq war and to reconnect with the issues most immediately affecting citizens’ lives, such as health care, education, and energy costs. The formula worked well to neutralize Obama’s lack of experience and expose his opponents’ indebtedness to politics as usual. In effect, Obama offered the Democratic electorate, and now offers all of us, a red, white, and blue American formula: Policy Solutions Without Politics. “Together, we can . . . .”
The Republicans found their voice late in this campaign. They were already saddled with an unpopular administration. Then the primaries derailed their most qualified candidate, and their eventual nominee had to mend fences with the party base. Only at the convention did the GOP find its voice, however briefly it may turn out. Sen. McCain’s choice of Gov. Palin launched the Republicans’ version of Policy Solutions Without Politics. Its elements include McCain’s self-identification as a maverick, his bipartisanship, and Gov. Palin herself, of distant Alaska, a can-do, post-feminist mother of five, who disdains self-appointed community organizers and rejects the baubles of office.
The need for sober lawmaking
Elections remain democracy’s most solemn undertaking. If we rue the irrationality of Policy Solutions Without Politics, whatever its electoral appeal, what we ought to regret also is the framers’ decision to abandon selection of the president by Congress. Had the framers stuck to their original plan, the president would resemble a prime minister and candidates for that office would not urge us to transcend politics. Prime ministers cannot do so; they live in mutual dependence on their parliamentary party. That dependence encourages strong political parties and in turn fosters accountability to citizens’ interests.
When they made election of the president independent of Congress, the framers kept the president’s powers limited. The unintended result was a confusing office that seduces citizens into expecting transformation but denies presidents the powers to bring it about. To their credit, the framers did not want a dictator as chief executive but favored a restrained, if vigorous, government that esteemed politics: representation, deliberation, power sharing, and the rule of law to enforce decisions reached.
Democrats and Republicans have both sounded the siren call of transformation in this campaign, the language either lofty or folksy. But in neither case does the strategy augur well for the sober lawmaking that the financial crisis demands. Democrats and Republicans need to practice politics. They need to deliberate and bargain vigorously not only to stabilize the banking system in the short term but also to design the legal infrastructure that will secure its future. And then there’s Iraq, and Afghanistan, a resurgent Russia, and health care, and education.
Americans still hate politics. But it’s a luxury that they cannot afford. The financial crisis may have restored politics to the 2008 campaign. If so, we are the better for it.
Dr. Sherratt is Professor of Political Studies at Gordon College, Wenham, Massachusetts.
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