President Giuliani. President Romney. President Huckabee. President Just-Shoot-Me.

In America, anyone who wants to can grow up to be president. That's the problem.

There is no guarantee at all that the next occupant of the Oval Office will be as opposed to the Iraq war as the vast majority of the American people have been for several years. There is no reason to assume that the White House will be held in 2009 by someone who believes that what George W. Bush and Dick Cheney have done to the Constitution constitutes impeachable high crimes. It is today entirely possible that the next president will leave health care to the pharmaceutical lobby, energy policy to the oil companies, and science to the Scriptures. There is nothing remotely comforting about our current system for selecting presidential candidates, about the way presidential campaigns are conducted and covered, or about the process in which ballots are cast, counted and translated into electoral votes. To think otherwise is denial, wishful thinking -- the magical thinking of children.

Despite all this country has gone through, anything can happen next November. Why should we believe that 2008 will not produce a president as incompetent and lawless as 2004 did, or as unelected as 2000 did?

If we think the news media in 2008 will rescue us from lying and demagoguery, we must have slept through its coverage of the run-up to Iraq, its yawning at Valerie Plame's outing and the Justice Department's corruption, its enabling of the Social Security "crisis," of "amnesty" propaganda, of the "other side" to evolution and climate change.

If we think that three billion dollars' worth of campaign ads in 2008 won't persuade Americans that day is night and black is white, we must not recall the Swift Boating.

If we place our faith in the critical thinking skills of the American people, we must have amnesia about the majority persuaded that Saddam Hussein was behind 9/11.

If we believe that turnout in November 2008 will be unprecedented, we must also believe that voter caging, voter roll-purging, voter intimidation, papertrail-free machine voting, dubious election eve indictments, and the rest of the Rovian coup technology will somehow, perhaps out of the goodness of their own hearts, have been renounced by the Republican executive branch overnight.

What I'm trying to get at is the stupendous sense of powerlessness among our citizenry that our current political system has created. It's as though the best democracy can do is to cough up this beast that we're being required yet again to ride. The nominating system, despite the folksy patina that quadrennially makes reporters swoon, is thoroughly idiotic, and it's gotten worse every time than the cycle before, yet we treat it like a force of nature, not an act of hacks. Money is more important than ever. And though the Web has enabled unprecedented citizen pushback on candidate deception and media spinelessness, its reach feels puny, compared to the paid messages that special-interests can buy in the marketplace; its impact feels impotent, compared to the partisan fearmongering posing as news and the circus acts masquerading as information on our mass media.

Electability is much on Democrats' minds. But no matter who runs against the GOP next fall, the political system we pretend to have inherited from the Founders could still produce a President Giuliani, a President Romney, a president more Bush than Bush, more Cheney than Cheney. This is not the genius of American democracy. This is the pathology of a terrible systemic illness. Some people may be too busy waving flags or scarfing corn dogs to notice the symptoms. But for many, perhaps most, our political system's sickness is so clinically depressing that sleep seems the only available alternative.

I fully understand the conventional wisdom among insiders. Impeachment? Off the table. Reform? Been there, done that; the unintended consequences'll kill ya every time. Revolution? Puh-leeze. Call me when there's a draft. The closest I hear to a call for the kind of change we need is the mushy-mouthed bipartisanship so beloved by editorialists; if that means finding common ground with the likes of Mitch McConnell and James Dobson, then count me out.

I know, too, that polls put issues like campaign finance reform, political reform and media reform way down low. But I wonder whether Americans, given the choice, might actually put "I feel totally bummed out and disenfranchised by what democracy and politics have become" near the top of their presidential season bitch list. The only problem is, given our melodrama-lovin' media, I wouldn't put it past some two-bit despot or third-party opportunist to ride that wave of outrage all the way to the White House.

Comments

[CanSoc]

In no other country in the world is democracy so widely and at the same time so badly practiced. Mr. Kaplan has well expressed one reason why the U.S. voting turnout is so low, and why it is declining in other countries. The situation will not begin to change until American civic literacy, the lowest in the industrialized world, begins to improve. Otherwise the old saying about people getting the government they deserve unfortunately holds. As Bill Maher has said, George W. Bush is American voters' punishment for their intellectual laziness.

[researcher]

"If we place our faith in the critical thinking skills of the American people, we must have amnesia about the majority persuaded that Saddam Hussein was behind 9/11. "

do we really think our politicians think American voters have critical thinking skills?

our debates are nothing more than sound bites.

I have traveled the western world and the dumbest voters on earth are Americans.

American middle class line up year after year to vote for repubs and then the repubs screw them over and over and they appear to love it.

then Americans vote in some demos to control the house and senate and what do they get a spineless lack of courage.

this country is actually talking about the success of the surge. very few talk about the war crimes from our politicians that caused this illegal war.

the majority of Americans in their hearts are imperialists and war mongers.

it had to happen capitalism goes against just about every spiritual law known and most Americans will think I just made a religious statement that is how dumb we have become.

the most war mongering Americans we have are religious evangels.

Christianity died on the cross.

[ethnobotanist]

president just shoot me - that was too funny!

spot on!

[meokie]

Yikes Kaplan! Tell us how you really feel. Kudos on the Illuminated perception and perspective

[Janelynne]

Marty, your words are chilling and awaken us from the denial we cling to, the denial we cultivate. The state sponsored institutional corruption we face is overwhelming. The Congress is broken. The Supreme Court is broken. Voting is broken. The press is broken. The planet is broken. Our schools are broken, our cities are broken. Our healthcare is killing us and our pensions were stolen. Our nest eggs are evaporating. Our GNP depends on a bad war and property values that are tanking. Our jobs are at risk, and we create and manufacture nothing in this country. The corporate interests with their flunkies in media and government are violently keeping a death grip on the maintainence of the status quo. We are worried people, obese from empty calories and clueless from a diet of deception, escaping into all manner of behaviors and substances. Our children are exposed to heavy metals and plastic byproducts in the air, in the food. They are offered dummed down education with non-stop media propaganda. We need to have a revolution by ordinary people which begins and spreads by internet. We need to stop buying the bad food, the lies, the junk that America has become. We need centralized concentrated corporate wealth to feel the sting from the sea change in mentality of people who are not going to keep buying: People who are not going to take it anymore. The entire country should get behind the writer's strike, for example, and support in solidarity, every little guy's struggle in the country. That said, I am going back into denial.

[rbwinn]

Political parties are self-created societies which seek special status in government the way royalty have special status in European governments. The government of the United States is the people. Originally all voters in the United States were independent voters, and all candidates for office were independent candidates. There were no organized political parties in the United States until the election of 1800. To pretend that the election of an independent voter would be a catastrophe is just party propaganda.
Speaking of party propaganda, in April of 2005 Arizona Governor Janet Napolitano signed into law a Senate bill that removed the option to register independent from the Arizona voter registration form. The effect of this legislation on independent voter registration in Arizona is shown in statistics obtained from the Secretary of State.

2000-2002 107,715
2002-2004 165,771
2004-2006 26,483

When independent voters brought this to the attention of the Arizona news media, the news media without exception refused to publish these statistics. Now, that is what we call party propaganda. Don't forget to vote.
Robert B. Winn

[sandyfeets]

It would be great if we were really a democracy, but we're not. We're a republic, and that is not the same. I just finished reading a history book on the rise of that other great republic, Rome, and I was taken by the parallels between them and us. Their leaders looked down on democracy: it was a Greek thing to be avoided. But the government of the republic was set up by and for the benefit of the wealthy nobles and the laws were designed to assure that only they were qualified to rule. While it was not impossible for the common man to rise to a position of authority and power, the republic's rules were set up in a way to throw enough roadblocks to make that upward track very difficult to attain. And so it is with our republic: just substitue "corporations" for "nobles". We have so lost sight of our founders' vision as we see it, but remember they were all wealthy landowners too.

[bomont]

Mr. Kaplan states with precision the very condition that this writer has observed in his public and private discourse concerning the current state of affairs in this country. Mr. Kaplan’s readers could hardly disagree that the mass of modern United States citizens, does in fact, as an old sage once said “lead lives of quite desperation.”.
This writer, however, has a contrary opinion as to why this country is in such dire straits. It could very well be that the number one (1) mental illness in this country is not depression, anxiety or delusion but is undiagnosed and untreated pseudologia fantastica.
But what do you say is this writer’s proof of such a claim? Your attention is directed to the judicial, legislative and executive branches of your local, state, and federal governments. Look to your schools, police, military, and news media all of which have not eluded its pernicious grip. Name an institution, and it is there. Name any business and it exists in great numbers. Need one go further?
So do we continue then just to live with this factious disorder? Or do we attempt to purge or treat the condition? Do we save ourselves from ourselves?
Methinks, and the answer is that world history shows us that no democracy has survived very long when large numbers of its citizens possessed such a disorder. And finally, if change is, in fact, the only constant in this world, are we not possibly, to use a very overused term, at the point of our ‘endgame” as a nation? Now that is despair.

[raptor]

I read somewhere (well, yes, you probably can read anything somewhere)that American Presidents have become increasingly mediocre after Roosevelt. After GWB, who wants to be next?

[SCharb]

Bipartisanship doesn't mean allying with the wingnuts, it means appealing to the reasonable Republicans who also hate the "House Divided" and who don't think the Democrats are traitors. Such Republicans are few in congress, but there are Republican voters who long for peace.

There are also many Democrats who believe that all Republicans are automatically just like Dick Cheney and therefore Republicans don't have a sense of decency. Those Democrats shouldn't participate in bipartisanship either. It's a two-way street.

[kurtz66]

You've hit the nail on the head. Until we fight for real campaign finance reform AND insist that news agencies return to reporting news (as opposed to opinion), we will never be represented by leaders who have our best interests at heart.

[ranchobob]

It wouldn't be so bad if they didn't keep saying the "best democracy in the world" and talking about our moral leadership.
Why should we, even if we could, lead morally?
talk about national megalomania and blindness.
I am moving to a new town next week, and I plan to become the moral leader of my neighborhood. Because I am morally superior to everyone else. Why am I superior? Because I say so.

[Darwinman]

"Electability is much on Democrats' minds. But no matter who runs against the GOP next fall, the political system we pretend to have inherited from the Founders could still produce a President Giuliani"

So what are you getting, if the people elect Giuliani, and unless you can prove beyond a reasonable doubt that he cheated, remember innocent until proven guilty, it is the will of the people, where do you get off saying that the will of the people is irrelevant, just because they elect a president who you don't agree with? That is a dictatorship, that is tyranny, that is the real shedding of the constitution. We the People, decide our leader, not only people who you believe should vote, and decide. As for you statement against bipartisanship, why then should I one who truly loves America and it would seem democracy attempt to find common ground with you? See how vile, and un-american that seems. Democracy, is the best form of government that man has as of yet conceived, your hatred of it is all too telling of the views of the far left, which prohibit the expression of any view foreign to it, it is the same reason why a Republican at Berkeley is completely disenfranchised, and yet a liberal at Irvine is respected. Because when it comes right done to it, and this post add confirmation, liberals hate freedom unless things are going their way.

[itsnotmyfault]

How disheartening is the prospects that the American electorate could once again deliver some rightwing nutcase aligned with the tenets of this Bush administration. Do not ever forget that all of this lunacy was pretty well evidenced by the time election 2004 came around. Yet Bush won reelection. As the London Independent headline asks - "How can 59000000 be so dumb"

[Marlyn]

"I recall an interview with George McGovern a few years back, when he was asked about his enormous 1972 loss to Nixon."

At the time I viewed McGovern as an anti-war candidate, a one issue candidate. And when he said he would get rid of the Defense Dept, I thought he wasn't being realistic. I thought he went too far. I thought he didn't really want to be president, that he just wanted to end the war in Vietnam.

Now I am for Dennis Kucinich who would replace the Dept of Defense with the Dept of Love. Call me a flip-flopper, or call me someone who learned. I believe Dennis wants to be president, and he is not just a one issue candidate.