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Caucus Carcass
January 4th, 2008 at 22:51
Can it really only be something like 44 weeks until the American election? Its surprising how fast time flies when there’s a two year build up to an election. Unlike the British system, where we get our elections over and done with in the space of a month, America stereotypically does things bigger, more dramatically, with infinitely more amounts of faffing about. Its happening earlier than ever this year too: the parties will have their candidates decided by early February – and then they’ll have a nine month gestation period before the election, where a new President is born, and the other candidate is mercilessly aborted (metaphorically speaking).
What surprises and yet horrifies me about American elections is just how different the Presidential candidates are to the people we’d consider suitable for Prime Minister over here.
In Britain, if someone professes to be a gun nut, you’d want to keep a close eye on them, and presumably, not get on their bad side – and if they really love guns, you may label them a psychopath. By contrast, in America, someone who loves guns in the perfect candidate for President – and it’s the people who want to get rid of guns who are the loony crackpots.
The weird thing is that the people who love guns most, usually the more conservative candidates, are also the candidates who claim to be big on “valuesâ€, the obvious implication being that the other candidates are more morally bankrupt – call me insane because I disagree, but I think it’s probably hard to be morally wrong if you’re the one who’s anti-guns.
Similarly, over here if a politician said that they thought a magic man in the sky created the Universe in six 24 hour days only a few thousand years ago, and that the collective body of scientific discourse over the last few hundred years is wrong, they’d be rightly laughed out of the Westminster village. In America, on the other hand, there are three Presidential candidates – Tom Tancredo, Sam Brownback and arguable frontrunner Mike Huckabee, who all reject the theory of evolution. And if you’ll allow me to grossly simplify, I find it a bit terrifying that aside from the obvious fact that they’re clearly driven by religious dogma rather than actually thinking about it, it’s a bit worrying that men who can’t grasp GCSE-level science will have the finger on the nuclear button.
There is one Presidential Candidate who we wimpy, secular Europeans can relate to, I think. Dennis Kucinich seems pretty cool – he’s all for universal health care, ratifying the Kyoto protocol to reduce carbon emissions, getting out of Iraq, getting rid of the death penalty and increasing gun control – the sort of things that we’ve got used to assuming politicians have as their policies (can you imagine the PM saying the environment isn’t something we need to care about?), so he sounds great.
Unfortunately for Dennis though (yeah, that’s right, we’re on first name terms), is that the Americans think that he’s a nutter. In the Iowa Democratic caucus, he won a staggering zero percent of the vote. And you don’t need to be an electionologist to realise that’s not very good. Poor Dennis.
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