INTERPRETING POLITICS THROUGH AN ELECTION YEAR LENS
BY JULIANNE MALVEAUX
Let me declare the obvious. This is an election year. That, perhaps,
explains the sharp shift in tone from our “bipartisan” President who is now
offering up his own dead body as defense on budget actions he describes as
“tax increases.” The fact is that war and recession have moved Democrats to
say that the package passed in April 2001 should be placed back on the table.
Democrats aren’t so much calling for tax increases as for tax
reconsideration. After all, the deep tax cuts of 2001 were instituted when
everyone thought that the living was easy, the budget was bulging, and the
surplus was high. Now, we have found billions to bail out war-bruised
industries. We don’t increase taxes by taking back false promises. Instead,
we behave with some fiscal responsibility.
But this is an election year. Usually, the President’s party loses seats
in the House of Representatives and the Senate as the people adjust their
preferences in a mid-term election. But this President’s popularity has
soared as our nation has girded itself for war. His party hopes that his
popularity will reverse the trend that allows the opposing party to chip
seats away from those in power. In January, his party has a reason to hope.
Come November, when all 435 House of Representatives seat and a third of the
Senate seats are up, there’s no telling what the polls will say.
Bush would like to skew it his way. Thus the incendiary rhetoric. He is
willing to offer his dead body to make it clear how strongly he is willing to
stand against Democrats. But Democrats don’t need his dead body, only the
bipartisanship he has so frequently embraced. Of course, we aren’t likely to
get it in this election year.
In this election year, we are seeing partisanship bubble up from the calm of
bipartisan response to terrorism. Republicans are gleeful about turf wars
among Democrats, which explains the interest so many have in the purported
conflict between Rev. Jesse Jackson and Rev. Al Sharpton. Newspapers and
magazines have blurbed the Rev. versus Rev. clash, with New York Magazine
most recently noting that this is an Oedipal conflict between two highly
motivated and very similar black men. Since when is white America so
interested in the minutiae of black folks’ relationships? The interest is in
neither Jackson nor Sharpton, but in conflict between Democratic leaders.
Similarly, the reality of our upcoming election seems to have shaped the
health care debate. While some (Republicans) would offer tax credits, which
don’t spend if you are poor, others insist on tax rebates and federal
assistance. It is likely that Republicans would stay out of the health care
debate altogether were it not an election year, a time when chits are being
counted, and when it behooves people on both sides of the aisle to take a
position on health care.
Republicans are the masters of spin. The repeal of their tax cuts
becomes a tax increase. Their suggestion of a tax credit becomes a health
care plan. Wolf tickets – like an exhortation about a dead body – become
firmness. The controversy between Dr. Cornel West and Harvard President
Larry Summers becomes an opportunity to bash affirmative action and black
studies. All the conservative columnists – George Will, Michael Myers,
Shelby Steele, Mary McGrory (some wouldn’t call her conservative, but she
lines up with them on racial matters) got into the details of the Harvard
brouhaha. Would they be so ready to pounce were this not an election year?
After all, in this election year, part of the spin is the many ways we make
hyphenated constituencies irrelevant. Black folks fighting for dignity?
Whining. Latinos asking for fair share? Tripping. Women asking for their
rights, something Laura Bush is pushing in Afghanistan. In the United
States, this is simply special pleading. So pardon the conservatives who
pounce on b lack Harvard scholars. In this election year, their real goal is
to undercut any influence held by the Jacksons and Sharptons of the world.
It’s all spin, but some of the spinning may careen out of control as
people realize that the same issues have a different resonance this time
around. It’s an election year. People who get past spin may learn that the
price we paid for an April tax cut was an October Social Security deficit.
They may learn that the price of cosseting corporations will shop up on their
bottom line. We may all learn that bipartisanship plays well in crisis, but
partisan blather is the rhetoric of the day in an election year.