[Peace-discuss] Would We Be Better Off If John McCain Were President?

Mon Jul 18 09:20:51 CDT 2011

[I think Branfman is right, that the answer to his question is yes, for reasons 
that he suggests, altho' there's a lot wrong with the article. I think he's 
wrong for example about Obama's and Clinton's original political positions, and 
about the 'powerlessness' of the presidency. Far worse, Branfman doesn't draw 
the implication of his argument - that Obama should be defeated in 2012 as a 
rejection of his policies, military and economic, and an instruction to whoever 
succeeds him that those policies must be reversed. --CGE]

Would We Be Better Off If John McCain Were President?
By Fred Branfman, AlterNet
Posted on July 17, 2011, Printed on July 18, 2011
http://www.alternet.org/story/151665/would_we_be_better_off_if_john_mccain_were_president

Democrats were united on one issue in the 2008 presidential election: the 
absolute disaster that a John McCain victory would have produced.

And they were right. McCain as president would clearly have produced a long 
string of catastrophes: He would probably have approved a failed troop surge in 
Afghanistan, engaged in worldwide extrajudicial assassination, destabilized 
nuclear-armed Pakistan, failed to bring Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu to the 
negotiating table, expanded prosecution of whistle-blowers, sought to expand 
executive branch power, failed to close Guantanamo, failed to act on climate 
change, pushed both nuclear energy and opened new areas to domestic oil 
drilling, failed to reform the financial sector enough to prevent another 
financial catastrophe, supported an extension of the Bush tax cuts for the rich, 
presided over a growing divide between rich and poor, and failed to lower the 
jobless rate.

Nothing reveals the true state of American politics today more than the fact 
that Democratic President Barack Obama has undertaken all of these actions, and 
even more significantly, left the Democratic Party far weaker than it would have 
been had McCain been elected. Few issues are more important than seeing behind 
the screen of a myth-making mass media, and understanding what this demonstrates 
about how power in America really works—and what needs to be done to change it.

First and foremost, McCain would have undoubtedly selected as treasury secretary 
an individual nominated by Wall Street—which has a stranglehold on the economy 
due to its enjoying 30 to 40 percent of all corporate profits. If he didn’t 
select Tim Geithner, a reliable servant of financial interests whose nomination 
might have allowed McCain to trumpet his “maverick” credentials, whoever he did 
select would clearly have also moved to bail out the financial institutions and 
allow them to water down needed financial reforms.

Ditto for the head of his National Economic Council. Although appointing Larry 
Summers might have been a bit of a stretch, despite his yeoman work in 
destroying financial regulation—thus enriching his old boss Robert Rubin and 
helping cause the Crash of 2008—McCain could easily have found a Jack Kemp-like 
Republican “supply-sider” who would have duplicated Summers’ signal achievement 
of expanding the deficit to the highest levels since 1950 (though perhaps with a 
slightly higher percentage of tax cuts than the Obama stimulus). The economy 
would have continued to sputter along, with growth rates and joblessness levels 
little different from today’s, and possibly even worse.

But McCain’s election would have produced a major political difference: It would 
have increased Democratic clout in the House and Senate. First off, there would 
have been no Tea Party, no “don’t raise the debt limit unless we gut the poor,” 
no “death panel” myth, no “Obama Youth” nonsense. Although there would have been 
plenty of criticism from the likes of Rush Limbaugh, the fact remains that 
McCain, a Republican war hero, would never have excited the Tea Party animus as 
did the “Secret-Muslim Kenyan-Born Big-Government Fascist White-Hating 
Antichrist” Obama. Glenn Beck would have remained a crazed nonentity and been 
dropped far sooner by Fox News than he was. And Vice President Sarah Palin, 
despised by both McCain and his tough White House staff, would have been 
deprived of any real power and likely tightly muzzled against criticizing 
McCain’s relatively centrist (compared to her positions) policies.

Voters would almost certainly have increased Democratic control of the House and 
Senate in 2010, since the Republicans would have been seen as responsible for 
the weak U.S. economy. Democrats might even have achieved the long-desired 60 
percent majority needed to kill the filibuster in one or both houses.

Democratic control of the House and Senate fostered by disastrous Republican 
policies would have severely limited McCain’s ability (as occurred with George 
W. Bush) to weaken Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, unemployment insurance 
and other programs that aid those most in need. (Yes, domestic spending might 
have been cut less if McCain had won.)

Had McCain proposed “health insurance reform,” because health insurers saw a 
golden opportunity to increase their customer base and profits while retaining 
their control, the Democrats would at least have passed a “public option” as 
their price for support. And possible Health and Human Services Secretary Newt 
Gingrich—placed in that position in a clever move to keep him away from economic 
or foreign policy—might have even accelerated needed improvements in 
computerizing patient records and other high-tech measures needed to cut health 
care costs, actions that he touted in his book on the subject.

In foreign and military policy, McCain would surely have approved Gen. David 
Petraeus’ “Afghanistan surge,” possibly increasing the number of U.S. troops 
there by 40,000 instead of 33,500. But Gen. Stanley McChrystal would probably 
have remained at the helm in Afghanistan, since he and his aides would never 
have disparaged McCain to Rolling Stone. McChrystal might have continued a 
“counterinsurgency” strategy, observing relatively strict rules of engagement, 
unlike his successor, Petraeus, who tore up those rules and has instead 
unleashed a brutal cycle of “counterterror” violence in southern Afghanistan. 
(Yes, far fewer Afghan civilians might have died had McCain won.)

McCain, like Obama, would probably have destabilized nuclear-armed Pakistan and 
strengthened militant forces there by expanding drone strikes and pushing the 
Pakistani military to launch disastrous offensives into tribal areas. And he 
would have given as much support as has Obama to Israeli Prime Minister 
Netanyahu’s opposition to a peace deal because he believes that present policies 
of strangling Gaza, annexing East Jerusalem, expanding West Bank settlements and 
walling off Palestinians are succeeding. (It is possible that a McCain secretary 
of state might not have incited violence against unarmed American citizens—as 
did Hillary Clinton when she stated that Israelis, who killed nine unarmed 
members of the 2010 Gaza flotilla, “have the right to defend themselves” against 
letter-carrying 2011 Gaza flotilla members.)

While McCain would have wanted to keep 100,000 U.S. troops in Afghanistan until 
2014, he might have been forced to reduce their numbers, as has Obama. For 
McCain would have faced a strengthened and emboldened Democratic Congress, which 
might have seen electoral gold in responding to polls indicating the public had 
turned against the Afghanistan War—as well as a far stronger peace movement 
united against Republicans instead of divided as it now is between the desires 
for peace and seeing an Obama win in 2012.

Most significantly, if McCain had won, not only would Democrats be looking at a 
Democratic landslide in the 2012 presidential race, but the newly elected 
Democratic president in 2013 might enjoy both a 60 percent or higher majority in 
both houses and a clear public understanding that it was Republican policies 
that had sunk the economy. He or she might thus be far better positioned to 
enact substantive reforms than was Obama in 2008, or will Obama even if he is 
re-elected in 2012.

Franklin Delano Roosevelt took office in March 1933 after a 42-month Depression 
blamed entirely on the Republicans. Although he had campaigned as a moderate, 
objective conditions both convinced him of the need for fundamental 
change—creating a safety net including Social Security, strict financial 
regulation, programs to create jobs, etc.—and gave him the congressional 
pluralities he needed to achieve them. A Democratic president taking office in 
2013 after 12 years of disastrous Republican economic misrule might well have 
been likewise pushed and enabled by objective events to create substantive change.

Furious debate rages among Obama’s Democratic critics today on why he has 
largely governed on the big issues as John McCain would have done. Some believe 
he retains his principles but has been forced to compromise by political 
realities. Others are convinced he was a manipulative politico who lacked any 
real convictions in the first place.

But there is a far more likely—and disturbing—possibility. Based on those who 
knew him and his books, there is little reason to doubt that the 
pre-presidential Obama was a college professor-type who shared the belief system 
of his liberalish set: that ending climate change and reducing nuclear weapons 
were worthy goals, that it was important to “reset” U.S. policy toward the 
Muslim world, that torture and assassination were bad things, that 
Canadian-style single-payer health insurance made sense, that whistle-blowing 
and freedom of the press should be protected, Congress should have a say in 
whether the executive puts the nation into war, and that government should 
support community development and empowering poor communities.

Upon taking office, however, Obama—whatever his belief system at that 
point—found that he was unable to accomplish these goals for one basic reason: 
The president of the United States is far less powerful than media myth 
portrays. Domestic power really is in the hands of economic elites and their 
lobbyists, and foreign policy really is controlled by U.S. executive branch 
national security managers and a “military-industrial complex.” If a president 
supports their interests, as did Bush in invading Iraq, he or she can do a lot 
of damage. But, absent a crisis, a president who opposes these elites—as Obama 
discovered when he tried in the fall of 2009 to get the military to offer him an 
alternative to an Afghanistan troop surge—is relatively powerless.

Whether a Ronald Reagan expanding government and running large deficits in the 
1980s despite his stated belief that government was the problem, or a Bill 
Clinton imposing a neoliberal regime impoverishing hundreds of millions in the 
Third World in the 1990s despite his rhetorical support for helping the poor, 
anyone who becomes president has little choice but to serve the institutional 
interests of a profoundly amoral and violent executive branch and the 
corporations behind them.

The U.S. executive branch functions to promote its version of U.S. economic and 
geopolitical interests abroad—including engaging in massive violence which has 
killed, wounded or made homeless more than 21 million people in Indochina and 
Iraq combined. And it functions at home to maximize the interests of the 
corporations and individuals who fund political campaigns—today supported by a 
U.S. Supreme Court whose politicized decision to expand corporations’ control 
over elections has made a mockery of the very notion of “checks and balances.” 
The executive branch’s power extends to the mass media, most of whose 
journalists are dependent on executive information leaks and paychecks from 
increasingly concentrated media corporations. They thus serve executive power 
far more than they challenge it.

No one more demonstrates what happens to a human being who joins the executive 
branch than Hillary Clinton, a former peace movement supporter whose 1969 
Wellesley commencement address stated that “our prevailing, acquisitive, and 
competitive corporate life is not the way of life for us. We’re searching for 
more immediate, ecstatic and penetrating modes of living”; praised “a lot of the 
New Left [that] harkens back to a lot of the old virtues”; and decried “the 
hollow men of anger and bitterness, the bountiful ladies of righteous 
degradation, all must be left to a bygone age.” Clinton the individual served on 
the board of the Children’s Defense Fund, promoted helping the poor at home and 
Third World women abroad and at one point was even often compared to Eleanor 
Roosevelt.

Although her transformation began once she decided to try to become president, 
it became most visible after she joined the executive branch as secretary of 
state. The former peace advocate has now become a major advocate for war-making, 
a scourge of whistle-blowers and a facilitator of Israeli violence.

But while rich and powerful elites have always ruled in America, their power has 
periodically been successfully challenged at times of national crisis: the Civil 
War, the Progressive era, the Depression. America is clearly headed for such a 
moment in the coming decade, as its economy continues to decline due to a 
parasitic Wall Street, mounting debt, strong economic competitors, overspending 
on the military, waste in the private health care sector and elites declaring 
class war against a majority of Americans.

Naomi Klein has written penetratingly of Disaster Capitalism, which occurs when 
financial and corporate elites benefit from the economic crises they cause. But 
the reverse has also often proved true: a kind of “Disaster Progressivism” often 
occurs when self-interested elites cause so much suffering that policies 
favoring democracy and the majority become possible.

[...]

But however important the 2012 election, far more energy needs to be devoted to 
building mass organizations that challenge elite power and develop the kinds of 
policies—including massive investment in a “clean energy economic revolution,” a 
carbon tax and other tough measures to stave off climate change, regulating and 
breaking up the financial sector, cost-effective entitlements like single-payer 
health insurance, and public financing of primary and general elections—which 
alone can save America and its democracy in the painful decade to come.

Fred Branfman's writing has been published in the New York Times, the Washington 
Post, the New Republic, and other publications. He is the author of several 
books on the Indochina War.