Why I Won’t Be Voting Tomorrow
What a difference two decades make. The New Jersey primary is traditionally held so late in the year that the last time it mattered was all the way back in 1984. That was the year Gary Hart blew a last minute comeback against Walter Mondale by reminding New Jerseyans they didn’t live in California. “The deal is that we campaign separately,” Hart remarked about his wife. “That’s the bad news. The good news for her is she campaigns in California and I campaign in New Jersey.” Mondale wound up winning the state and the Democratic Party nomination before taking the first exit off of the turnpike of political oblivion that November right into the wastebasket of history. Gary Hart would join him there in 1988 after daring the media to follow him around and try to catch him cheating on his wife. They did.
It’s 2008 and nobody in New Jersey envies Californians anymore. No, we don’t have Yosemite, Big Sur, the Golden Gate Bridge or the University of California at Berkeley. Ansel Adams and Edward Weston never spent much time in Asbury Park. But still, we have never had to deal with Enron destroying our public utilities and we were never stupid enough to elect Arnold Schwarzenegger as governor specifically for the purpose of covering it up. Whatever Hillary Clinton, John McCain, Barack Obama or Mitt Romney think of the state, they’re all far too polished to tell any jokes about it. What’s more, unlike New York, the Democratic race here is still competitive. Obama has surged to within the margin of error against Hillary Clinton, even though she has the support of Jon Corzine and the powerful New Jersey state Democratic Party.
Nevertheless, I won’t be voting in the New Jersey primary this year.
This doesn’t mean I don’t see any differences between any of the candidates. I’m disappointed that Dennis Kucinich dropped out of the race two weeks ago, but that still leaves a strong anti-war protest vote in the form of Ron Paul. If I wanted to I could cross over and vote in the Republican primary. The choice between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama is easy. Obama has brought new voters into the political process where the Clintons have done their best to suppress them. A two term Hillary Clinton presidency would mean that by the time she gets out of the White House there will be people close to 30 years old who weren’t even alive the last time the president wasn’t from one of two families. Hillary Clinton has close ties to Christian fundamentalists. Obama doesn’t. Hillary Clinton voted for the invasion of Iraq. Obama didn’t. Bill Clinton took huge campaign contributions from Suharto’s cronies in the early 90s, then stood by and twiddled his thumbs while Indonesian death squads burnt East Timor to the ground in 1999. Hillary’s surrogates have run a nasty whispering campaign against Obama’s middle name of all things, “Hussein”, insinuating that he’s some kind of stealth Muslim ready to move Bin Laden into the White House basement ten minutes after he takes the oath of office on the Koran. Nobody who campaigns against a man’s middle name belongs in the White House. I want the Clintons out of politics as much as anybody else.
But what most people don’t consider is that whenever you vote in an election, you cast two votes.
The first is your vote for your candidate. Yes. I think Obama would make a better president than Hillary Clinton. Yes, with my vote for Ron Paul, I’d like to encourage the Republicans to change their ideas about foreign policy. No. I don’t think Mitt Romney belongs in the White House. Yes, I’d like to reward John McCain for spending five years as a prisoner of war in Hanoi. Yes, I’d like to move Jesus back into the West Wing by voting for Mike Huckabee, and so on.
The second vote is an automatic "yes" vote on the process, on the election itself. By participating in the election you're saying that yes, you find the choices offered are acceptable, that the process has been fair, that the debate leading up to Election Day has covered all the relevant issues, that you consider both parties to be legitimate.
In reality, this election is about as legitimate as an election in Iraq under Saddam.
First of all, there’s no guarantee my vote will count. Al Gore was clearly the winner in Florida in 2000 and Gore and the Democratic Party declined to fight against the appointment of George Bush to the White House by the Supreme Court and for the decision that the American voters actually made. Four years later, in spite of the suspect vote count in Ohio, John Kerry declined to spend the millions of dollars he had left over and left it to the under funded Greens and Libertarians to conduct an investigation.
Second, the Republican Party under George Bush and Dick Cheney lied to the American people to manipulate them into destroying a small, impoverished Middle Eastern country, as of now the greatest war crime of the 21st Century. George Bush used the terrorist attack on 9/11 to push unconstitutional and even treasonous legislation through the congress. He’s mounted a relentless attack on American civil liberties for seven years. He’s repealed Habeas corpus, a legal tradition in English speaking nations going back hundreds of years. He’s brought convicted felons like Elliot Abrams and John Negroponte back into the government. He’s legalized torture. George Bush and dozens of his cronies belong in leg irons and behind bars, not free to work the lecture for pay and lobbying circuits after they get out of office in 2009. And yet in spite of this, the Democratic Party has declined to do their constitutional duty and impeach these criminals for the disgustingly selfish reason that they believe pursuing justice might cost them the White House in 2008. Voting in this primary legitimizes Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid “taking impeachment off the table”. It legitimizes their decision to continue to fund the occupation of Iraq in the hopes that it will continue to go bad and hurt the Republicans. Iraqi and American lives for votes? Shred the Constitution in order to get someone with a “D” behind his or her name in the White House? No thanks.
Finally there’s the primary process itself. The all white states of Iowa and New Hampshire are given a ridiculously disproportionate weight in choosing the nominee. Both parties have worked with the corporate media to marginalize real debate about the war and civil liberties. Dennis Kucinich and Mike Gravel were excluded from the process altogether when they asked too many hard questions. There’s little discussion in the media about the role of super delegates and while this is a decision made by the corporate media and not the Democratic or Republican parties, both parties still allow media outlets to sponsor debates instead of moving the process back to a non-partisan organization like the League of Women Voters. While the Republican Party has been slightly more open on debating the issue of the occupation of the war in Iraq, actually demanding that Fox News include anti-war Libertarian Ron Paul when they tried to exclude him, the New Jersey primary is a winner take all primary. A vote for anti-war Republican Ron Paul winds up as a delegate for the fanatical militarist John McCain.
For the Democrats, the real game is being played between two factions of the elites. The economic, military and political elites are solidly behind Hillary Clinton. The cultural elites have lined up behind Obama. We the voters are sitting in the stands passively watching. Hillary Clinton should be able to win. Goldman Sachs and the arms industry usually trump Oprah Winfrey and Hollywood. But if there’s any explanation about why Obama has exploded so brightly onto the political scene in 2008, it’s the fact that TV and Hollywood have stepped up to shroud the political debate in a fog of big budget escapism. They’ve managed to convince a good chunk of the cultural elite and millions of American voters that you don’t have to confront the occupation of Iraq or the destruction of the Constitution at all, that you can simply retreat into an expertly produced big budget epic of an escapist fantasy where a black Kennedy revives Camelot and where the invasion of Vietnam or Iraq, the terrorist attacks on 9/11, or legalized American torture never happened. This is politics as entertainment, an attack on democracy using an 18 month long Presidential campaign.
My vote is not to participate.
