Playing the Wrong Game

By Aman Gill

Biden and Palin in Thursday's VP debate agreed on exactly two things. 1. They luuuuuv Israel (The love is not equal though; Palin's is much less elitist: "We will support Israel. A two-state solution, building our embassy, also, in Jerusalem, those things that we look forward to being able to accomplish, with this peace-seeking nation, and they have a track record of being able to forge these peace agreements." Expectations exceeded.) 2. They don't like married gays. We don't often get to hear about the shared foundations upon which we are governed, so I appreciated them making it a little more clear.

I'm not supporting either presidential candidate, so I look at this race sort of in the same way I might watch a football game featuring two mediocre teams--without much vested interest, but with some interest in gamesmanship, the battle of strategies and the exploitation of matchups. And I have to say that the coaching on Team Democrat is severely deficient, even looking at it from the vantage of their own interests.

26% of Americans approve of George Bush's job performance. 35% think Sarah Palin is competent to act as president, if necessary. Coarsely, somewhere in that quarter to third of the electorate is the base of the Republican Party. Within this fraction are the 13% of voters who think Obama is a Muslim. They probably think it's awesome that the two chants at the RNC were "USA! USA! USA!" and "Drill, baby, drill!" They're charmed by Sarah Palin's folksy vapidness, just as they were (and apparently still are), by Bush's.

They will never vote for Barack Obama.

Yet the Democrats won't cast them off in the way that the Republicans have disavowed the votes of anyone who identifies as, or to the left of, a liberal. Biden didn't invoke the large majorities in his favor on Iraq, Afghanistan, climate change and Palin's readiness to assume office? Palin's total discourse on Iraq was "surge" (repeated 10 times), "victory," and don't fly the white flag of surrender. She repeated her stupid line on climate change, that there's no point in focusing on causes, just solutions. Etc. But there's no offense. It's not an issue of weakness, it's that the Democrats are afraid of the right-wing echo chamber, and don't want to alienate the people who will never support them.

There's a history to this orientation that's based in the prostration of labor and black leaders to the Democrats, offering their people as a sacrifice, every four years, to the god of lesser evil. And they of course will not imperil their posture as the responsible party of American imperialism.

But even within this framework, they are a historically terrible party. They want the Republicans' god vote, ignoring the potentially powerful appeal that secularism could have over the electoral center, especially after the Bush years. They won't trash the ridiculous argument that a victory in Iraq is at all possible in the first war that was dumb even from Washington's own perspective. Biden wouldn't attack what I thought was the most notable passage from the debate last night, where Palin embraced the Cheney corollary to the doctrine of the unitary executive--which is that the executive is unitary, above the other two branches, except for the VP, who is outside of all three. The list goes on...

Any thoughts out there about what things might look like if the Democrats gave a Rove-style "fuck you" to the right third of the country?