It is time to put my prophetic talents to the test on the upcoming election, while it is too difficult to say who in particular might win, why even professional pundits refuse to put themselves out to venture a specific guess on one particular candidate, I am going to be bold and daring as I don’t have a reputation on the line.
First we must interpose some givens to the calculation, one it is not a two party system that we are analyzing, inherently the United States only has one party that is divided into a liberal and a conservative wing, the Democrats and the Republicans are thus part of the same idealistic structure executing predefined characteristic aspects based on a scaling left or right tendency.
As a rule of thumb we have observed that the Democrats tend to remain to the left of the political scale while the Republicans tend to be on the right wing of it. The two parties would have us believe that they offer a full spectrum to satisfy and guide our diplomatic and political needs. The assumption suffices to make it difficult for any third parties, i.e the Libertarians, greens, etc, from acquiring a significant hold within the Washington structure, though it is not necessarily impossible for another party to enter into the political arena, as was the case when the Republican party entered Washington, however it is interesting to note that the Republicans succeeded not in adding another party but in supplanting the Wigs thus proving amply that the political infrastructure of Washington at least as far back as the American Civil War, was already unable to carry the weight of three parties and so silently defaulted and organized itself under the dichotomy of the Democrats and Republicans.
That assumption will seem ludicrous to most people ask a conservative “What do they have in common with a Liberal?” and the reply will come back to instant animosity, they will find it difficult to explain similarities, they will find it necessary to make the Democrats communist and foreign sympathizers, and launch them off the patriotic branch as traitors. The reply will not be any different from a Liberal; the conservatives will always be uptight, xenophobic, money grabbers of uncaring magnitudes. However both parties are undoubtedly linked as one.
We have observed the Clintonesque revolution which was actually when the party of the left went way towards the center if not outright trespassed into Right wing mythology, rule from the center, the left can be business and labor union friendly ambidextrously, it could be equally against excess regulation and Monopoly friendly towards first rate job producers and first rate exporters such as Microsoft.
The revolution did not just happen in such context at a national level, it was visible from the island across the pacific where Tony Blair was able to denude the Tory’s of all pride by displaying a natural friendliness towards conservative economic values while running a savory economy as managed by his star Mr. Brown. It would be difficult to discern valuable differences between the Tories and Labor when the Tony/Brown team was executing, to the point that one could dare egregiously state that from the side lines some Tories not so far from center approved of the Tony and Brown show.
Finally nothing could demonstrate better how far the British Prime Minister had gone over the conservative wall than his support and active lobbying for President Bush’s Iraq war project II. Tony’s indefatigable sale of the war reached comic proportions, against the British peoples and even against the strong on defense Tory’s, some which became doves when faced with a hawkish Labor Prime Minister.
Of course Tony Blair was not setting a precedent when he opted to use conservative values to blur party lines and thus confuse everyone into inaction while Tory and Labor alike fuddle around figuring which PM eject-system’s cogs and pullies to yank. It was Disraeli, perhaps the brightest man to ever rule Britain, while less charming than Sir Winston he, Disraeli was able to judo master his opposition into disrepair with their own arguments. And while I am not going to prove it here, it may well be that Disraeli was the most callous and cunning liberal that ever existed, regardless he did an spectacular job as a Tory Leader, something which still baffles my mind to no end; except for the obvious, once the Tory’s figured that they had a liberal usurper within the clan and they realized that he could win elections, they figured it was better to be the party in power under the leadership of a impostor than to be ruled by the opposing party in any guise.
The point is that while the concept of Liberal and Conservative values have been segmented into stark contrast to the benefit of a chained bicameral party structure that does not mean that they don’t share each others values nor that those values are not to the benefit of their constituency and what is most relevant, what fuels the parties are the voters and they come from the same pool, regardless of class, ethnicity and generation the voters are one amorphous mass, they must all be lured to vote so that the differences and tendencies of the national psyche may be discerned.
Which means that it is the voters that will decide the 2008 election for the United States of America will ultimately decide where the country’s psyche is as regards to the threat environment, economic prospects, social and moral, etc… consciousness. But that leads directly to the prospect choices and how they will stand out from the pack, even in a state of representative government the voters will decide all outcomes.
While all of that explanation may seem out of context it squarely sets responsibility upon each individual voter to state their position and to allow them to participate in the intricate meshing of all varying political positions to be silently recombined into a single possible candidate option that will satisfy the national psyche. Yes, it is a lot of responsibility placed on one by the many, and yes it probably is primitive that we still believe in the concept of one decision maker leading the pack and they having ultimate power over all, and we are thus to patriotically and blindly follow after executing only one vote of trust.
But there is one thing we must take into consideration despite of what the pundits will have you believe the truth is that we do not formulate our opinions overnight, or even in a matter of two year long campaigns, each individual voter is influenced by an infinite set of factors, some radical some not so radical and oddly some not so of this world, so while campaigns can be rather interesting and adrenalin filled they are only there not so much to acquire a following but rather to spit out the candidate that will best spit out the desires and wants of the mass psyches. In a sense it is a campaign for the hearts and minds but in reality the minds and hearts are already predefined by the given number of circumstances and happenings that have already molded the posterity of the national psyche. In that context each candidate is not so much formulating a platform but rather catering to the platform that the mass national psyche has rendered over decades of experiences.
When we look at elections we must also take into consideration the epoch effect, this is not something that can be taken lightly even as it takes centuries to accumulate its effects, it is glacial dynamic and so change is hardly perceptible but eventually there is enough pressure in any given direction to cause your occasional significant tectonic plate shift, in this case we are of course referring to the politics and the accidents that accompany such into a demolition of old into new or old-new political operational models.
Charting the tumultuous of these events is not a simple thing to do and we are not going to do it here, we are instead going to prophesy as that allows us to be wrong in every way and still carry forward a reputation. First the guiding post of the prophesy, we are going to say that “there is currently a movement silently cresting that will cause havoc throughout the consumer based economies and ripple outwards into all other economies in so far and so impact full as they are economically internationally connected. Yes those with the least to lose will be those that have not made it into the international economic stage or/and those, ironically, that have been sanctioned, and thus kept forcefully out of the economic grid.”
That is the first aspect of the prediction we are also going to say that the time frame for it to eventuate is imminent, meaning that many of those that read this will witness the prophesy here within.
Now on to the election of 2008, which may or may not be truly a desirable post to be in. It is herewith believed that the election will be interesting from a historical point of view as it will not be the usual overseen of the superpower and policing enforcement of all of its policies world wide, instead it will be more that management of a severe downturn of affairs; this we mean that even if the hemorrhaging of economy doesn’t overtly manifest itself there will still be a substantial undertow that will drain and devastate entire sectors of the economy bringing necessary protectionisms to an overbearing dimension that will cause more harm than good and cause fanatical oscillations throughout the land with nationalistic and international consequences.
No one wants to be a prophet of doom not only because there have been so many failed prophets of doom but also because no one likes the bad news and so will disdain the prophet for it; but there are times when the burgeoning dimensions touch the prophet in such a way that they mandate telling even if it is merely heart burn. And so we proceed, “The election will be won that best represents the times pending.”
We have a precedent of a woman in Argentina winning the election so we can say with some certainty that there could be a trend towards female rulers developing, thus while everyone will be impressed with an American female president it certainly will not be the first female president of the Americans much less so of the world; we could thus rebuff the claim accordingly.
Currently there is also a trend in the Americas to lean to the left, though the Left is not sure what to make of that because it is still recovering from winning at politics with business, defense, religion friendly politics and by sidestepping traditional social and union concerns. Still we have seen how Nicaragua, Bolivia, Venezuela, Brazil have elected leaders to the left of the democrats, so there is some form of developing pattern there but we are going to ignore it, instead we are going to use the most difficult gauging parameter possible, the glacial change meter.
“The time has cometh for glacial change drama; people and times will bring about a cataclysm through the urgings of innerving energetic movements in the world political psyche, we are further going to brand ourselves heretics by saying that politics is an accident and not a natural institution, in philosophical terms an accident is something you can do without because it is not part of your pure essence, your eyes are blue, your blood is red, your pretty, but those are accidents of your being, you are none of those things, above those things is your soul, your soul is what energizes your existence, your body, even your body is an accident of your soul, something that happens because your soul enters the world, and here we are saying that when you enter the world your communication with others breaks down, chatters, and the fragments try to realign and communicate again, they start talking and signing contracts and politics arises such is the reproach to one’s and another’s soul. Politics is an institution but it is not natural, entire societies, civilizations, cultures and peoples can live without politics.”
Everyone is of course expecting the democratic party to win the election, Bush is such a stark contrast and so maligned by his handling of the war and his fervent isolationists policies that one does not have to go far to assume that he has lost the election for the Republicans. But that would be too simplistic of analysis, there is ample evidence that the Republicans could win the election again, after all there is a lot of pent up Anger in the American psyche, the American people feel cheated, they think the United Nations and the World bank are using America while employing and helping American batchers. They feel that the European union forgot how it got its start and is now becoming a competitor, so much so that American politicians go out of their way to fragment the EU alliance by catering to British dissent. And then there are those Muslims, no matter how often Americans sacrifice their lives to give them the right to vote and allow their women to drive and to cover their faces with Revlon instead of cloth, they are rebuffed, and then a jihad is declared against them with such furor that one cannot understand how their number one customer for oil can be so ill treated. But even with the plausibility of these arguments the reality is that Bush got reelected even as he had failed not because anyone thought he could fix the mess he got the nation into but rather because he continued to truly express America’s discombobulated anger over foreign disdain for American values and form of governance thus a conservative court overruled democracy, in an election, when it counted.
I put this in a separate paragraph intentionally, the supreme court did not elect a president that wasn’t desired by the national psyche, had there been a coin toss the results would have been the same, the race was close because the nation was jittery and confused, but it leaned on the side of the irrational, “react, react, lets not be reasonable, we are tired of being reasonable.” Gore would have been reasonable because he is afraid of emotion which is why he intellectualizes presuming that what you can know cannot bite you in the ass; Gore was too reasonable, he would have left volumes of national pent up angst unrepresented, given the choice the nation decided to vent via the junk yard dog that could not tell friend from foe.
The question is: “Is the nation willing to endure one more republican?” The answer is as simplistic as it needs be, “No.”
Regardless of how emotional Americans can be at heart they are more pragmatic and reasonable, they are afraid of runaway power, they want power to be controlled because they are afraid of how power corrupts and may then wrecks havoc upon the mass, for the most part the two party system has been the biggest check and balance against power mongers, and it is highly doubtful that Americans feel that they can allow the war prone party to rule for another four, the political propensity should lean away from the Republicans because of chance or due to the natural pendulum of political movements, or most likely because it just does not make sense anymore; the rampage period has come to a close.
We can eliminate Bush, and we can eliminate Rudy from the equation, I like Rudy, he seems to be a charming enough fellow, he could carry on the Bush legacy, his human factor is high for he has ample flaws and, marketing wise, is willing to admit to it, but he has that little bit of: “I love myself more than I love you.” And I think we will all have a problem with that.
Thompson, his tired, he doesn’t have a plan for the rest of his life so he decided to run fro president as if it was on the list of: “What do I do next?” Aside from that there is nothing original about that and presidents do not win elections because their wife’s are more competent.
I think we are all aware that the truth talking candidate has a truth talking candidacy but nothing else and in the real world it does not matter if you were proved your patriot soul by being in a Vietnamese jail because you went there to kill them, there has to be more than that, such as policy other than defense, there has to be an international and an economic policy, besides patriotism is becoming a liability and not an asset in an advancing world economy and freer labor flows. Sorry Senator McCain but unlike you we are all not still fighting from the perspective of Vietnam, this in no way ought lessen your suffering or sacrifice, we are just dealing with European, Russian, Asian economic markets that have nothing to do with weather we like our own country.
We could go down the endless row of republican candidates and you can argue that it is pointless; no one is going to win because the republicans are going to lose. We can then examine Obama the charming fellow coming almost out of nowhere to capture serious attention but equally proving that a charmed front can be subdued through substance. Yes there is something not there about his approach, he didn’t read enough, he forgot that charming can be deadly if ennobled with a real agenda, instead he allowed Hilary to prove that whatever she lacks in charmed she makes up by being prepared and able. This could be an argument for competence, the American people have had enough incompetence from their President, they are ready for someone who is going to mend fences and build relationships with the international community while keeping a strong sense of defense, there is something mighty and righteous about Hilary Clinton, she doesn’t seem to be a push over, and she certainly has had to battle, sometimes with her hands tied behind her back as when she was first lady, and others with the full arsenal of the senate in hand and no one can say that winning a New York senate seat is easy, she did it. Of course some will say she is riding on the coat tails of her husbands supreme political capital as he is a master at the craft of diplomacy, frankly I still don’t know if there is such a thing as Clinton doctrine but if there is it is probably I am happy with the way things are but sometimes bad things make me cry, I feel a lot.
Yes I think Clinton was sort of the Left’s response to Regan’s immense popularity with the electoral, but Regan had a very codified platform both in Economics and International policy, his expenditure on defense in a relative peaceful time for superpower politics should have seemed senseless, and it probably was, but he orchestrated well and then took the credit for the fall of the soviet union in a single sweep public relations coup that could have had little basis in reality. After all we now know that he was miss informed about Soviet Potential and capability. Where he did cause great impact was in not interfering with the disintegration, it must have been tempting, his national security advisors and secretary of state must have been tempted to proactively scavenge for the leftovers of the Soviet Empire, Regan didn’t go there, he dint cause any unnecessary friction, he let the twilight of the cold war go unsung, perhaps his greatest achievement. However Clintonesque politics did not call for change or high minded agendas, they called for equilibrium between the left and the right, he blared the last trumpet for discourse between the right and the left, and more remarkably he was able to do so even as the Republicans unleashed an all out attack, but Clinton held the middle ground in his politics and when he left the middle ground caved in and Right and Left when at each other in every platform and arena possible, the slug fest continues.
The colossal nature of the battle between the two camps is interesting because they are indeed part of the same concatenating political machine, but it helps us to conclude that the barometric pressure is set to blow, it is possible to imagine that the two party system is at an end, that it has run out of ideas or that the post cold war order calls for something else, that we are indeed facing a pending change in how politics are done at home and abroad, and we can question if it is feasible to have an Executive Branch, so much power concentrated on the whims of one elected official seems anti democratic and dangerous indeed, perhaps the day of the republics are coming to an end, its possible. If that is the case we may use that criteria to further narrow down if our next candidate will be an Elephant or a Mule.
Reality time, if a liberal wins the election, which is most likely, it implies that there are is still potential energy in the context of the capitalistic and democratic system as we know it today, that is to say that Democrats are more likely to take risk and spend callously and to take care of people, as they are naturally insecure and think that caring for others will some how imply that those others or the system will eventually care for them, thus they make the argument of socialize health care, nutrition programs and hand holding till old age. Any election that elects a democrat not only means that there is still potential in the current existing system but further that there is still hope, hope of changing and modifying the system enough so that it can keep going on from here to eternity.
There are plenty of people that think that the constitution does not need to be modified that it is some kind of perfect conceptualization of the ideal politic and can therefore remain unchanged and unchallenged for eternity. This might be a bit naïve considering that so many emperors and kings thought that there could be no alternative to monarchy and even the people that they subjugated respected such ideal, at some point though the concept of monarchy failed to fit into the national political psyche and it was thus abandoned.
It is most likely, based on the historic record, that our ideals of government, constitutions and even justice will be outmoded by new ideas and manners which we have not predicted, and so here we have a firm hard rule judgment to make, has the time come for a change of mind sets, have we reached a point the history of histories where we can no longer operate on the set of standards set forth more or less around the French revolution and the Greek foundation of rock voting democratically?
How then are we to tell that the time has come for such dramatic change?
If the time has come for change then it follows that the conservative forces will have to dominate the political arena, and I think that there is plenty of evidence that everything is shifting to the right, again it would be difficult to think of Clinton or Blair as left wingers, it would be impossible to say that they were not pro business, further they were willing to sacrifice ideals so as to reach compromises and master the art of statistically popular governance.
There is then enough evidence before us to say that if the Left has begun to lost its idealism for socialistic principles, if the unions and regulation have lost support within the Democratic party, if Hilary Clinton is willing to rethink her health package so that it is healthier on hospitals, pharmaceuticals, the American Medical Association and Insurance, then we can say that the discerning eye would have a difficult time discerning Right from Left.
It is not, and this is what we are saying, it is not a compromise, the country has shifted left, even its liberals are shifting gears for the Right, so that you can say that there will not be a valid sense for good old liberal values, what Hilary Clinton and Obama will be doing is looking to the center or the right for guidance, and their electorate will feel more comfortable if they do that, after all it is not like unions can sit there and argue that jobs can be created in the American car market when the cost of labor and production overseas can clip the value of American labor in half.
Which implies that we could argue that if the Left wins the election it is still somewhat as if the Right have won it, that they Left have successfully stolen the platform from the left, that in fact they have made themselves giraffes that can eat on either side of the fence, the implication is that if the nation is getting conservative as a whole then the stamina and potential of its institutions is used up. However ff Hilary Clinton gets elected it will not imply that liberal values have won because she has mastered the art of staying as close to the center of opinions and values so that everyone may can of say, “Well she might not be that bad.” As oppose to Obama that only has one position on the war in Iraq and so would have no option but to be against the war and could not back down from it, Hilary can turn towards the necessity of the occasion as warranted.
The problem is not one inherent to the candidates but rather one inherent within the confines of the system the political parties have not only matured but are in their twilight, we know this because they have perfected their arguments to the point of paralysis, they are out of new ideas nothing that a Republican or a Democrat tells you is going to surprise you. Some people will argue that there is still a lot of steam in their engines but these are the same people that would look at a combustion engine and think that because it only outputs about 40 percent of its energy towards locomotion that we can get to 90 percent efficiency, that is of course a fallacy, the basic principles and architecture that define the combustion engine capitalize all of its true potential at about forty percent, to gain efficiencies in output you have to change the concept an turn it into a hybrid, or base an engine on entirely new technologies and principles, which means that the best researches on engine power aren’t dedicating their energies to combustion, the system has been perfected, regardless of how many flaws are left.
In the same way we can see that anyone could say that there is still a lot of room for improvement within the framework of a bicameral democratic system, and equally and more accurately say that as things are you are not going to get anymore out of the two parties that drive this political machine, the time is ripe for a change, the question is will that change come now or later, and if later how much later. Again the stagnant nature of ideas of both parties indicate an imminent change, no one has found the third way or if the current system will just morph into a hybrid of some sort. But regardless we must take that into consideration as to who is going to get elected.
If the system still has potential in it then it should be a democrat, if it has close to zero potential it should a conservative or a overall conservative democrat, thus our choices are not easy; besides that there is another factor, Hilary is a woman and Obama is a black man, people like to make history or more accurately to participate in historic events, either way it would be history in America, since we still make distinctions based on national borders, we can discount Margaret Thatcher, Angela Merkel, Germany, Argentina President Cristina Fernandez, and Liberia’s Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf, so women in America and some men will cast their vote based on gender to break the glass ceiling, others, blacks, minorities and liberal whites might side with Obama as they would cast a vote to put the first black president in office, in the end these type of voters will have to draw their choice from the leading member candidate up to the election but doubt not that it will be a perceived value aggregator to the one of the two that makes it to the finals.
The thing is that there are no accidents as to who gets elected, the national psyche will make corrections till the very last minute like an owl homing in on its prey never letting the beak break center from the quarry jetting right or left, ascending or descending .000003 second adjustments accordingly, however prophets make predictions and move on and are therefore prone to philosophical accidents, i.e. things that are not natural to their predictions happens.
We can then predict that, since it is not a two party system but rather a two stroke engine, the people will raise to power the appropriate politician for their times and hungers. If the parties had a possibility at all, of losing to a third party the engine would be more diverse, complicated and dynamic, but party creation is not an instantaneous process, and well structured systems have rightly, or wrongly, a focused vision. Two eyes are always better than one, but not two right eyes nor two left eyes.
As a final note I will unveil my vote of no vote for either party. I will not participate in the national spectacle that has become the political arena because my consciousness is not reflected in it. The belief that we have to vote for at least the lesser of two evils is not for me a realistic approach to making a serious difference in world affairs. The fact is that when peoples are in harmony they are the least political, it is not to the advantage of political parties to see solutions beyond the political realm, thus it is objectionable that they will have us think that we are by some endemic nature political beasts. By denying the energies of my vote to the political process I am limiting the scope of their mandate and perhaps adding weight to the unveiling of other possibilities.
Ricardo Correa
