The Hindu : International : A campaign that left America divided

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Thursday, Nov 04, 2004

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International

A campaign that left America divided

By Simon Tisdall

LONDON, NOV. 3. Before it even began, the 2004 presidential race looked certain to be one of the most ugly and polarising electoral contests of recent times. In the event, it fully lived up to these low expectations.

Now the question is: how to put America back together again? Binning the victory party balloons and confetti is the easy bit. The far bigger post-election mess will take far longer to clear up.

The 2004 campaign finally shattered the old idea of the melting pot. It divided and subdivided Americans not just by party preference and ideology but by ethnicity, class, religion, science, income, demography and geography to a degree rarely seen.

Both to blame

This trend, for which both parties were to blame, undermined the concept of a shared U.S. citizenship. It weakened the very bonds of nationhood. The word `liberal' was confirmed as a term of abuse. Patriotism, the birthright of all, was misappropriated. Even God got a Republican bumper sticker.

Some tactics may have left lasting wounds. The Bush campaign hit rock bottom in September when the Vice-President, Dick Cheney, recalling the 9/11 attacks, suggested a vote for John Kerry was a vote for terrorism. ``If we make the wrong choice, then the danger is we'll get hit again,'' he said in Iowa.

Mr. Bush employed similar scaremongering in the closing stages, apparently swaying many voters. Though he did not invent the idea, the politics of fear now seem embedded in U.S. electioneering.

Mr. Kerry's calculated reference to Mr. Cheney's gay daughter, Mary, in one of last month's presidential debates was his campaign nadir. Sacrificing principle to point-scoring, this cheap shot was aimed at sowing discord in the core Bush-Cheney Christian fundamentalist base.

Both parties, but especially the Republicans, resorted to voter manipulation through record spending on negative advertising that misrepresented each other. The dishonest besmirching of Mr. Kerry's Vietnam war record was a prime example.

Despite the McCain-Feingold campaign finance reforms, enacted after the 2000 election, more money, private and corporate, was thrown at this race than in any contest in U.S. history.

Flood of cash

But this flood of cash could prove a washout, thanks to voter fatigue among the 5 per cent of `undecideds' and to ``voter suppression'' tactics that cancelled out party advantage.

Voter suppression took the form of attempts to convince the rival candidate's committed voters, or those leaning towards that candidate, that their vote did not matter and they might as well not vote.

Voter suppression

Democratic-inclined African-American areas and Florida panhandle Republicans both got the treatment. According to the Democrats, voter suppression — or intimidation — also lay behind the background checks and scrutiny of voter registration documents undertaken by some state Republicans at polling stations yesterday.

And all the while, the legal eagles circled over the bleeding body politic. In a country where both godly and ungodly must ultimately answer to the Supreme Court, it is the lawyers, not the meek, who inherit the earth.

Partly as a result of all this, popular distrust, cynicism and mutual intolerance reached new heights.

A New York Times/CBS News eve-of-poll survey found that a clear majority of those interviewed did not have ``a lot of confidence'' that their votes would be counted fairly. Fifty-one per cent said the campaign was the most negative ever seen. — © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2004

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