Feb. 7, 2008 

It is a seemingly odd sense of American irony that Super Tuesday’s political parade was held on Fat Tuesday, the last day of Mardi Gras—perhaps giving us a strange new meaning to Lent. Should we call it Super-fat Tuesday? Just what are we suppose to be giving up on the day after? I’m not sure of this meaning, but it does give me some trepidation about the future of real change that everyone is talking about.

The thing is that it may make little difference who actually wins this election and the promises that are made to voters to gain their votes, as the game is already fixed, so that whoever wins the White House in November will have to deal with the crisis of over whelming debt, a deepening recession, and a bloated military budget for an intractable and unwinnable war. In other words, no matter how idealistic or

inspirational these political leaders are, they are going to be screwed five minutes after being sworn in. And by this, I mean the domestic aims of universal health coverage, investment in transportation infrastructure and education, or of dealing with global warming and energy dependence–– domestic aims that will all be sabotaged by a failing economy. No money means no new programs.

I don’t think that this is a mistake or even a miscalculation by the Bushites, but rather that it is an extension of both the trickle down spending policies of the 1980’s and the present privatization of the military budget. It would be good to recall just what happened at the beginning of Bill Clinton’s first term in office, just after the savings and loan collapse, with the country still struggling with recession. Hillary’s national health care initiative bombed through a combination of needless complexity, concerns about cost and attacks from industry special interests and rightwing ideologues calling it “socialism.”

Much the same can be expected this time as well, there will be no Republican majority in Congress in January 2008, but will it matter?

Even-though the Democrats are ideologically opposed to the Bush model of cutting taxes for the rich and bankrupting the treasury with war, they do not, over all, understand what is really at stake, nor do they have the strategy by which to defeat the economic “shock therapy” that will be levied upon us once they take power. This, I believe, is the core difference between Hillary and Obama. Clinton knows that she cannot trust the neocon free market capitalists types and has accurately described them as the“vast rightwing conspiracy.” Obama just wants to turn the page and bring America together in one big kumbayah moment. No matter how well intentioned he is, this just ain’t gonna happen. The divisions are just too deep.

That Hillary gets that this is an ideological war for the future of this country only means that she will be better prepared to fight once in office. Even more so, she may well be the last presidential candidate of my generation who actually remembers the conflicts of the Vietnam War era and the unaccomplished political goals that were never realized over the last forty years that are still relevant today. She is perhaps the imperfect bookend to this chapter of American conflict, which has taken us from the assassinations of our most inspired leaders to the deposing of a corrupt president and the ignominious failure of a war in South East Asia and now to our current imperial occupation of Iraq, which attempts to justify and rewrite this history differently.

Obama, with all the inspiration and oratory of the dead Kennedy brothers, mistakenly wants to turn the page on this grievous chapter—I don’t believe this is either wise or good, but it is certainly heartening and uplifting that there is a leader who still believes in the inherent goodness of the people.

Democrats who gain the majority in Congress next year and the President who must lead them need to be prepared for the oncoming crisis that is going to hit this country like an Arkansas tornado.The triple whammy of the sub-prime loan market collapse, the looming recession and the huge $9.2 trillion deficit will likely hog-tie the aspirations of the “change” minded. They are going to be spending more time fixing everything that has intentionally been broken over the last eight years (like habeas corpus, the torture doctrine and FEMA) with little time to create new solutions. All the while the economy will be screaming and bleeding—the only thing a Democratic president will be able to do is to open up an economic triage unit and to replace all of their policy wonks who have Chicago School of Economics pedigrees.

It is indeed a very tall order, and once the ceremonial change comes, it means those who actually believe in real change must be committed to fighting even harder to make it happen after the inauguration party ends. The neo-cons will not go quietly into the night, nor will their policies that we inherit simply be overturned—the game has already been stacked.

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