America chooses its president

Dr Gray Wasseman of John Hopkins University — passionate about the rough and tumble of American politics.

As many of our native English readers will readily admit, the local news section in the Bangkok Post can be a tough read for anyone who lacks an understanding of the intricacies of Thai society, its politics, cultures and religions. That’s why those who are interested also turn to other sources, like the recently published Thaksin: The Business of Politics in Thailand by Pasuk Phongpaichit and Chris Baker, for example.

For Thai readers, of course, the local news section is usually the easiest part of the newspaper. Their problems lie elsewhere. Take the upcoming American presidential election, for example. First, language certainly can be an obstacle – there is the vocabulary of elections to master. Fortunately, that is relatively easy. Indeed, the next week should be enough time for the diligent reader.

A far more difficult task is trying to understand the complicated US electoral system and the particular issues involved in the 2004 contest. Even many Americans find that challenging. It is worth the effort, however, since the more background you have on a subject, the more interesting it becomes. It would be a shame to read our election coverage during the coming week simply to build your vocabulary.

One person who has spent much of his career explaining American presidential politics to Americans and non-Americans alike is Dr Gary Wasserman of John Hopkins University. He is currently Professor of American Government at the Hopkins Centre in Nanjing China. Dr Wasseman was in Bangkok earlier this month for a series of talks under the sponsorship of the US State Department’s Cultural Affairs Office. The learning post was fortunate to be able to spend part of an afternoon with him to get his take on this year’s election.

In explaining the American electoral system to non-Americans, Dr Wasserman likes to point out how it differs from systems like the one found here in Thailand. “I don’t think people understand how decentralised the (US) system is and how much of the system is not controlled at all from Washington,” he observes.

“The American republic was started by people who had a healthy fear of government and so they put in all kinds of protections and devices that would not allow power to be centralised,” Dr Wasserman explains.

National political parties reflect this, he says. American parties tend to be much weaker and more loosely grouped than those found in many other countries.

“The power in parties tends to be on the local level and it gets weaker as it goes up. That’s evident in the primary system (elections where political parties select their candidates). Party leaders do not select their party nominees. They are selected in primaries in each state. The voters in the party select who they want the nominee to be so it is a loose process in which the states decide.”

That is also true of the presidential election itself, Dr Wasserman observes. “In many ways, the general election is not one election but 50 state elections in which the voters in the state decide on the electors that will be sent to the Electoral College.”

The Electoral College, much maligned in recent years, was also designed to protect the power and influence of the states at the national level. In this system, electors are allocated to each state based on the number of its senators (all states have two) and its representatives, the number of which depend on its population.

In almost all cases, this is a winner-takes-all system, so a candidate need only win by a single vote to garner a states’ full slate of electors. The underlying idea here, explains Dr Wasserman, is that “the president ought to be selected by enough support from the different states – not just everybody in New York and California.”

Interestingly, in this election, none of the candidates are spending much time in either New York or California, both of which are expected to support Senator John Kerry by wide margins. Instead they are focusing on the 20-or-so states where the races are more competitive. Many of these so-called “swing states” are quite small in population and they would likely be ignored if the election was decided strictly on the basis of a national vote.

The disadvantage to the system, as was clearly illustrated in the last election, is that the candidate receiving the largest number of votes overall, may still fall short in the Electoral College. But this, says Dr Wasserman, is extremely rare and it is unlikely to be a factor in the 2004 election.

During his visit to Bangkok, Dr Wasserman conducted a roundtable discussion for a select group of local journalists which the learning post was lucky enough to attend. He began the session with a very useful analysis of the strategies adopted by the two campaigns. It goes a long way towards explaining why the election is so close despite America’s troubles in Iraq and an underperforming economy, factors which would seem to favour Sen Kerry. Here are excerpts from that analysis.

“George Bush entered this year as a very weak incumbent. If you look at the polls, he seldom got above an approval rating of 50 percent. When Americans were asked whether they approved of the direction the country was going in, most said ‘no’. President Bush had been battered fairly badly in the Democratic primary and he was dealing with an economy that wasn’t generating any new jobs. He was stuck in a war in Iraq that got only increasingly worse and he himself was a polarising figure in the United States…The result was that the Democratic Party, at the beginning of the year at least, was very much united against his presidency. In dealing with these weaknesses, Mr Bush adopted two strategies.

“The first one was to remind people of 9-11 and that he was a war president, that he had united the country after the terrorist attacks of September 11^th 2001, that the threat from terrorism continued and that a strong decisive leader was necessary in this war situation. So he fairly consciously elevated the situation of threat facing the American public. Democrats would say that he raised fear among the population and he used that fear to gain support among the public.

“The second part of his strategy was to go negative on John Kerry. Not only did he try to remind people that he was a war president and that there were grave threats to the country, but that his opponent, John Kerry, was weak, indecisive and too liberal. The way he would gain votes was by saying, well, whatever doubts you have about me, this other guy is weak. He’s indecisive and you don’t want him as your leader.”

“In 2002 there was a poll taken on which party you would trust with national security issues. The Democrats came out 40 points behind the Republicans. The Democrats have always been considered a weak party on national security issues. So Kerry, in many ways, wanted the campaign to focus on domestic issues.

“Kerry tried his best to agree with Bush on Iraq policies because in campaigns when your opponent has a strength on an issue, you agree with him. You agree with him because you don’t want the issue debated. You don’t want to talk about your opponent’s strengths. You want to talk about your opponent’s weaknesses.

“The opponent’s weaknesses in this case were domestic issues – jobs, health care, and education. If people are asked whom do you trust to do more for you on domestic issues, they will say John Kerry. If you ask whom do you trust to defend your country against terrorism and be a strong commander in chief, they will say George Bush. So Kerry tried his best to be as close as possible on national security issues to George Bush because he wanted to get the conversation going on domestic issues.

“It didn’t work for a couple of reasons. One was because the Iraq war intensified. The Iraq war got worse and worse. In a curious way, that helped Bush in my opinion because it drew attention to national security issues.

“And the second thing is that Kerry was also hindered by his own conflicting statements. This was partly because he ran in the Democratic primary against anti-war candidates and tried to reach out to anti-war sentiment within the Democratic Party and it was partly because his own voting record in the Senate was a little bit inconsistent.”

Of course, things have changed a bit since Dr Wasserman’s presentation in early October, but the basic strategies have remained very much the same. That was clearly evident in the debates where President Bush first tried to paint his opponent as weak and inconsistent on the war in Iraq and the war on terror and then as an ultra-liberal senator (favouring higher taxes and expensive government programmes) who is out of touch with mainstream America.

Kerry, on the other hand, pounded the President for his failures on domestic policy – job losses, soaring health costs, tax cuts for the rich which resulted in record budget deficits. However, he was also forced to spend a lot of time talking about the war in Iraq and the war on terror. While he did score points attacking the President for his incompetent handling of both issues, polls show the American people still see Mr Bush as a stronger wartime leader.

There is no question, however, that the debates were an enormous boost to Sen Kerry’s chances. For many voters, he was able to dispel his image as being weak, indecisive and unfit to be president. Indeed, he often seemed more articulate, more eloquent, more presidential than his opponent. Consequently, it looks like we are going to have a very close race all the way to the election.

You can download useful vocabulary definitions to support this article. Log on to our learning post website www.bangkokpost.com/education and click on “Learning Post General Weblog” on the right.