Show of Shows: Pageant of American Democracy Hits Feverish Climax

By Christopher Boian  

WASHINGTON (RIA Novosti) – Magnanimous and archaic, visionary and impure, enthralling in its promise but noisy, bewildering and illusory in its delivery: The chaotic pageant that is American democracy hits its fevered climax Tuesday with selection of a leader who can plausibly claim to have obtained the consent of the governed.

The current occupant of the White House, President Barack Obama of the Democratic Party, hopes he will be given another four-year term to “finish what we started” in 2008. His main rival, Republican Party nominee Mitt Romney, says Obama has made a colossal mess at home and around the world that only a new leader – such as him – knows how to clean up.

There are four other candidates on the ballot in most states too – Jill Stein of the Green Party, Gary Johnson of the Libertarian Party, Virgil Goode of the Constitution Party and Rocky Anderson of the Justice Party.

But apart from Stein, who has been arrested twice in recent weeks – once in a protest at her exclusion from a presidential debate in New York and again at a protest in Texas over controversial plans to build a new oil pipeline – these challengers have received next to zero national media attention and are generally considered to have no chance of winning.

On Tuesday, tens of millions of voters in the 50 US states and the country’s capital, the District of Columbia, will make their way to thousands of polling places across the country to push computer buttons or mark paper ballots and express their will of who they would like to see designated the official leader of the United States.

At the same time, a little more than half of the approximately 207 million eligible US voters will make choices on numerous other ballot questions ranging from electing legislators and judges to deciding if marijuana and same-sex marriage should be legal and if rich corporations should be permitted to spend unlimited amounts of their money to support particular candidates.

The undertaking appears enormous and the stakes are, in theory at least, high, not just for Americans. At issue are questions of public policy, governance and personality, but also of national character, morality, societal values and even basic dilemmas of the human condition today that will color future discussion within the United States but also far beyond US shores.

The real question is not whether the selection of a US leader today and the host of other issues Americans will confront on Tuesday are important, but rather: Is the bewildering, wooly American electoral process truly what it purports to be -- government of the people, by the people and for the people?

Champions of the US political system that will reach another apogee on Tuesday argue that, at the very least, it offers wide and fertile ground for the unrestricted public airing of all manner of ideas. Critics however assert that it does nothing of the kind and, in fact, even actively discourages truly free thought.

“Essentially, the election is a method of marginalizing the population,” Noam Chomsky, the political activist, writer and linguistics professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology noted for his outspoken liberal views, wrote of the US political system ahead of the 2004 US presidential election that pitted Republican incumbent George W. Bush against his Democratic adversary, John Kerry.

“A huge propaganda campaign is mounted to get people to focus on these personalized quadrennial extravaganzas and to think, ‘that’s politics’. But it isn’t. It’s only a small part of politics,” Chomsky wrote in an article published in the Dubai-based Khaleej Times daily.

Other critics point to features of the US presidential election system such as the preponderant role of private finance, supervision of the voting process by partisan officials, inadequate public campaign funding and the electoral college voting system as just a few of the elements that conspire to keep the people at as far a distance as possible from genuine political participation.

“The political class fears a truly engaged citizenry,” political commentator Steven Rosenfeld wrote last month in an article published on the salon.com and alternet.org websites.

“Anyone who has looked at how elections are run outside the US knows how backward key pillars of our election system are. … Too much of the process doesn’t measure up to 21st-century standards.”

Even the live, nationally-televised, one-on-one debates between those determined to be the “main” candidates – Obama and Romney had three in the past month – often held up as proof of transparency in the US political process, are, critics charge, really little more than a superficial side-show.

“It is not really a debate but a glorified press conference,” commented one blogger on the Open Salon platform. “Journalists hurl softball questions at the candidates giving each the opportunity to regurgitate their perfectly rehearsed sound bites.”

The staunchest defenders of American democracy admit that the process does not always protect the interests of all voters. But they argue that, despite a litany of flaws ranging from wildly skewed voter registration lists in some parts of the country to documented, serious problems in actually counting votes; it remains the closest thing to allowing people to choose their leaders themselves.

The process that will crescendo on Tuesday is vulnerable to cheating and oppression, riven with flaws and injustices, complicated, often opaque and confusing for many. But, its proponents say, it works.

“Obama and Romney are presenting clear and contrasting visions of the future. That debate may get raucous, even shrill and angry. Nonetheless, on Nov. 7, one candidate will concede and the other will govern,” said Terrence Casey, political science professor at the Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology in Indiana.

“This is the essence of politics — free men and women collectively resolving our great questions through deliberation and debate. It is how divided societies like ours rule themselves without undue violence.”