US Elections. Another Year of Boredom. posted by Richard Seymour

Well, before I start, let me just welcome Sunday Telegraph readers to the world of reality. Unlike your chosen newspaper I don't carry MI6 leaks, although like them I'm occasionally inclined to piss on Blair. Anyway, to the matter at hand. John Kerry ... zzzaaarrgfgh... zzzzz woaaaahhh? Oh yeah, sorry, I just fell asleep and nutted the keyboard.

John Kerry is cruising ahead as the Democrat challenger to George W Bush this Fall (sorry, but I know the American appellations tend to wind up the more traditional ST reader). His inspiring message is that George W Bush lied through his simpering smirk about Iraq and he intends to storm into the Whitehouse and lie about something nicer, which I tend to think Americans will respond to since they like their lullabies sung with a little syrup. I'm not saying the US electorate are stupid - good heavens, no! - just the best part of the half that bothers to vote. No, the majority of Americans are pretty savvy about their political class, and Britons are getting there too.

But why are we talking about John Kerry, a man so boring that his face has fallen asleep and is almost slipping off his skull, when we all know Howard Dean was supposed to be the exciting one? A lot of attention has been brought to bear on the famous Whitmanesque 'yawp' he emitted after losing the first primary. But there appear to be other, more significant factor, which Dean's sudden emissions have only really compounded. First of all, Dean's whole campaign was based on retaining a monopoly on the antiwar vote - which, capture of Saddam slipping over the horizon, is back at the top of the agenda. He appeared to be relatively sincere compared to East Coast liberal elitists, down-to-earth, and passionate. He breathed fire on the Bush administration when other Democratic candidates were mouthing centrist bromides and pacifying the big dimwit in the Oval Office. He appeared to be saying what no squib from the Likudnik Democratic Leadership Council would have the guts to say - that America was being steered over a cliff by a drunk-driver and a moron to boot.

As Mike Davis notes , however:

"In Iowa and New Hampshire, ironically, Dean became the victim of his own campaign's success in forcing other candidates, particularly John Kerry and John Edwards, to speak out against the Iraq deception. Indeed Kerry, so long embalmed in compromise and hypocrisy, suddenly showed faint signs of a former self-the militant anti-war veteran who so eloquently denounced American war crimes in Vietnam before Congress in 1972.

In the last days before the Iowa primary, surrounded by Teddy Kennedy and an honour guard of veterans, Kerry reinvented himself as the "tough dove". Without a monopoly on the anti-war issue, Dean crumbled on his domestic flank, where his policies on healthcare, tax reform and welfare are indistinguishable from or to the right of other candidates.

In particular, his trademark "taking back America" appeal wilted in face of Senator John Edwards' more militant us versus them contrast of "two Americas". Edwards, boasting of his milltown origins, won unexpected second place with a rhetoric targeted precisely at the pain of Iowa's many downsized or deunionised meatpacking towns."

Dean's "antiwar" position was largely fraudulent in any case. He supported the first Gulf War, as well as the attack on Afghanistan, and he is also in favour of continued occupation in Iraq. His solution for the Iraqis?

'American with Iraqi, Arab characteristics. Iraqis have to play a major role in drafting this, but the Americans have to have the final say.'

So, now that his dedicated anti-imperialism is being matched by every other multi-millionaire Democrat, Howard Dean has lost his only bedrock of support. Dean's tenure as Governor of Vermont would make any Republican proud , and apart from the alleged antiwar stance, he has been the most illiberal of all the candidates on offer.

So, we're left with Kerry, a Deputy Dawg Democrat with slightly less charisma than any passing insect. True enough, when they broadcast some of his speech on Channel Four today, I found my eyes inescapably glued to the spiralling ascent and descent of a moth near the light-bulb. So, why is he getting all the votes? Old-fashioned tax and spend liberalism , as it happens - nothing too radical, and certainly to the right of the programme Clinton was elected on. Somehow I doubt that his policies will really create 3 million new jobs. I rather get the impression that Kerry is banking on the mechanisms of the business cycle to do most of his work for him. On the issue of Iraq, he is placing himself somewhere between Dean and Bush (between two planks of wood?) - he won't walk away from the world, and he won't walk alone in it. He wants to win the peace in Iraq , much like Howard Dean, Bill Kristol, George W. Bush etc etc, although he did make critical noises about the war before it started and then voted for it. He dismisses the commission to investigate the President's ignorance of the facts as a "sham". On the issues of workers' rights - stay with me Borygraph readers, it gets fun again - he's for a higher minimum wage indexed to inflation (not average income), and he certainly advertises himself as a friend of the unions. "He has a 90% AFL-CIO voting record in an 18-year Senate career" That said, he was for Nafta, with certain minor provisions, and wants to "fix" rather than "walk away from" the WTO.

The penny drops, I think. Kerry is experty deploying Clintonite "triangulation" - talking Left to mobilise the liberal voter base, while casually allowing business to know that he can run the country for them. It would be naive to expect Kerry to do anything different with a massive victory than Bill Clinton. Clinton discovered his limits when he was told the stock market couldn't take his plans for job creation, public spending and healthcare. He would have to cave in. By 1996, he was pushing through welfare cuts more and repackaging everything the Republicans wanted in liberal clothing.

The best thing for this election would have been to have a genuine, (as opposed to ersatz, pace Dean), challenge from the grassroots both to Bush and to the smarm-buckets in the Democratic Leadership Council. The tendency to valorise some return to 'normality' after the dangerous deviation of Bushism is the logic of depoliticisation at its worst. The Left ought to be as bold as the neoconservative right, think big, talk tough - and, just occasionally, act it.

But, that John Kerry, boy, he's... zzzz aaaahhrrr zzz snuuugghgh zzz...... ... ....