@JTT,
If this week's convention fails to achieve the widely predicted take-off in Mr Obama's ratings, does this mean that the presidential election is all but over before it started and that the world must prepare for another four years of Republican rule? The answer is an emphatic “no”.
It is too early to write off the Democrats, despite the poor start to their campaigning, because as polling day approaches, voters will realise that this election is not about the Democrats or Mr Obama or his relationship with the Clintons. It is about the Republicans and John McCain and his relationship with George Bush.
The maxim that “oppositions do not win elections; governments lose them” is not just a journalistic cliché. It is a profound statement about democracy. Since nobody can predict the future, it is impossible for voters to base their judgments on whether a future government will be successful or an untested candidate will make a good president.
Manifestos are rarely worth the paper they are written on. This is not just because politicians are dishonest but because unexpected events intervene. Dealing with the unexpected is a much more important function of government than implementing manifestos. Some politicians who seem well prepared and have clear policy objectives, such as Gordon Brown or Richard Nixon, turn out to be hopeless leaders, while others with little experience and few policy positions, such as Ronald Reagan or Tony Blair, end up being successful. Democracy is largely a gamble about who might govern best; and the right to vote is little more than a right to roll the dice.
politicians must always live in fear of punishment by the voters. But if voters repeatedly fail to punish incompetence or corruption or gross misjudgment, then the fear of defeat is lifted and democracy loses its disciplining power. And a country in which the dominant parties can afford to scoff at the discipline of the ballot box, is the point when democracy starts to slide into self-perpetuating oligarchy.
If the Republicans can get their candidate re-elected to the White House after all their failures of the past eight years - after the military misadventures, the geopolitical blunders, the economic mishaps and the mismanagement of natural disasters - America will be perilously close to the point when democracy ceases to perform its most essential function of disciplining political power
It is only by ejecting the Republicans from the White House that American voters can send the message that they are still in charge of their country and that gross government incompetence will not go unpunished. Accountability - not personality or rhetoric or colour or age or gender - should be the overriding issue in this election. The Democrats - with their naively high-minded focus on Mr Obama's alleged achievements instead of the Bush Administration's manifest blunders - do not yet seem to have understood this. But with luck, American voters will prove less naive than the Democratic high command.
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/columnists/anatole_kaletsky/article4621979.ece
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