Saturday, April 24, 2004

Posted here Saturday, April 24, 2004 at 11:54:55 AM     One way to understand why Bush is president is by looking at alternatives . A few months ago I proposed that Bush might have gotten many votes because he was more likely than Gore to use government power to protect the wealth gained during the Clinton years . But we can go further. What would have happened if Bush had not been elected ? The issue is larger than Gore . We had an opportunity in 2000 to face a new millennium and cope with the issues left over from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries . These had to do with the damage done by colonialism to people, cultures, and environment . There was the issue of justice in the United States and the ridiculousness of our having 2.3 million people in jail . It had to do with justice and the economy where the increasing skew of resources towards the rich was making life difficult for a very large number of people . But taking on these issues would have threatened the kind of society that many people had adapted to , the society of individual loneliness and a stress on economics . So Bush can be seen as being the way the country chose not to face those issues, with all their ambiguity  and unknowns . It was the choice of safe . That Gore had written a book on the environment and was super smart made him actually suspect . Likey to use it for something unpredictable. That he abandoned any loyalty to Clinton reinforced the idea that he was not bound by emotional commitments . So looking at what people avoided by voting for Bush may help explain his eletion. I think we see some of the same logic working against Kerry but Kerry seems to be playing this fairly well as a determinedly middle of the road candidate who can defend what we have better than Bush. it was actually Bush's radical weirdness through which he turned out not to be the candidate people thought they had elected . ********