Comrades!
Fellow Stakhanovite J. Carter Wood’s recent
article on the American presidential elections seems to me to hold out
an absurdly optimistic view of the possibilities for reform of the American
electoral system. Quite how a Bush presidency, coupled with continuing
Republican control of Congress -- at least until January 2003 --, will
somehow enable the reform of the "farce"of the Supreme Court
is completely beyond me. The more cynical might also wonder quite what
the legacy of the Green Party’s presidential effort will be, given
that once again the valuable task of organising on a coherent local
level -- which might yet yield eventual success in certain congressional
seat --was subordinated once again to the rampaging ego of that Seventies
has-been, Ralph Nader.
Two of Comrade Wood’s paragraphs discussing
Nader’s contribution to the recent election are, meanwhile, guilty
of highly misleading statements. First, he states that the Democratic
Leadership Council, the "New Democrat" organisation currently
chaired by Joseph Lieberman and which counts Bill Clinton and Al Gore
as former luminaries, was the "progeny of the 70s-era group known
as Democrats for Nixon". This is simply untrue and particularly
egregious given that Democrats for Nixon existed only during 1972, whereas
the DLC was founded thirteen years later in 1985. Those Democrats who
did support Nixon in 1972, most of whom now call themselves neo-conservatives,
had almost all become Reagan Republicans by 1980 and were certainly
not among the Southern Democrats who founded the DLC in order (or so
they thought) to present an alternative to Reagan during his second
term. Bill Clinton and his like may be guilty of many things, but to
suggest that they either supported Nixon, or were the intellectual offspring
of those who did, is totally and utterly mistaken. Clinton, in fact,
worked hard for George McGovern’s presidential campaign in 1972.
I am happy to refer readers to Kenneth S. Baer’s history of the
organisation, Reinventing Democrats, should they remain unconvinced.
Comrade Wood, in
company with a host of other self-styled analysts, also suggests that
"if Al Gore was unable to crushingly overcome the asinine frat-boy
antics of George Bush while Gore enjoyed the position of emerging out
of a "successful" eight-year period of Democratic rule, then
he doesn't deserve the highest office in the land". A more erroneous
assessment of the lessons of American political history is hard to imagine.
What would have been genuinely extraordinary would have been if Gore
had been able to crush George W. Bush, because the simple fact is that
Vice Presidents are notoriously bad bets to win presidential elections.
Only one sitting Vice President has won election as President since
1836: George Bush the elder, in 1988. This was never Gore’s election
to win and to suggest that it was, particularly given the backlash against
Clinton’s sexual misconduct in the South (even in Gore’s home
state of Tennessee), is entirely preposterous. Bush’s frat-boy
antics were entirely that: relics of his university days which never
surfaced as genuine campaign issues two decades later. The true parallel
for this election was always 1960, when a Vice President perceived as
worthy but uninspiring was narrowly defeated after eight years of prosperity
by a lavishly funded playboy with a famous father. Lamentable as the
election of Bush is, plans for the future cannot but be compromised
by errors of fact and wild exaggerations.
Yours,
Dominic Sandbrook
[See also J. Carter Wood's Reply
to this Reply] 
