How Big Can One Election Get?

By Tom Engelhardt, Al Jazeera English

29 October 12

Everything about this year is crucial and record-making - from attack ads to campaign donations, writes Engelhardt.

besity is an American plague - and no, I'm not talking about overweight Americans. I'm talking about our overweight, supersized presidential campaign. I'm talking about Big Election, the thing that's moved into our homes and, especially if you live in a "swing state", is now hogging your television almost 24/7.

There's a wonderful old American postcard tradition of gigantism, a mixture of (and gentle mocking of) a national, but especially Western, urge toward bravado, braggadocio and pride when it comes to this country. The imagery on those cards once ranged from giant navel oranges on railroad flatcars to saddled jackalopes (rabbits with antlers) mounted by cowboy riders on the range. Think of the 2012 election season as just such a postcard - without the charm.

Though no one's bothered to say it, the most striking aspect of this election is its gigantism. American politics is being supersized. Everything - everything - is bigger. There are now scores of super PACs and "social welfare" organisations, hundreds of focus groups, thousands upon thousands of polls, hundreds of thousands of TV ads, copious multi-million dollar contributions to the dark side by the .001 per cent, billions of ad dollars flooding the media, up to $3bn pouring into the coffers of political consultants, and oh yes, though it's seldom mentioned, trillions of words.

It's as if no one can stop talking about what might otherwise be one of the least energising elections in recent history: the most vulnerable president in memory versus a candidate who somehow threatens not to beat him, two men about as inspired as a couple of old beanbag chairs.

And yet the words about the thrill of it all just keep on pouring out. They stagger (or perhaps stun) the imagination. They are almost all horse race- and performance-oriented. Who is ahead and why? Who is preparing for what and how? Who has the most momentary of advantages and why? Who looked better, talked tougher, or out-manoeuvered whom?

It never seems to end, and why should it? After all, it's the profit-centre of the ages, pure money on a stick. And there's just so much to say about what is surely an event for the record books. The only question (and it's not one to be taken lightly) is: What is it?

The jumbotron election

It started earlier and lasted longer than any election in our history, and every number associated with it is bigger and better and more striking than the last. If you happen to have the TV on, every one of its moments is The Moment. I even heard one prime-time news anchor call the vice-presidential head-to-head "an epic generational debate".

Such hyperbole is the daily norm. Before the first presidential debate, another TV talking head assured his audience, "the Republicans were crawling out onto the 33rd floor ledge looking into the abyss". Then, for a while, that abyss belonged to Barack Obama and he was falling, falling, falling.

That was, of course, before the second of the three presidential debates, which arrived with enough fanfare to put the Thrilla in Manila or the Rumble in the Jungle to shame. It was, according to the logos I jotted down, "The Showdown", "The Rematch", "The Comeback", or simply "High Stakes" - but what wasn't in this election season?

Of course, Romney and Obama weren't doing something as mundane as simply debating each other for an hour and a half. They were preparing to head "into the arena" to demonstrate "the power of one night", and not just any night but "the most crucial single night of the campaign". All of this to be followed, of course, by debate number three ("The Last Face-Off", "The Final Showdown").

Everything about this year was, in fact, crucial and record-making, including the 73,000 (mainly attack) ads that saturated Las Vegas by October 12, making it "the place with the most televised campaign advertisements in a single year". (Cleveland came in second and Denver third.) And talk about obesity: for the two campaigns, which long ago busted out of their public-financing election togs, the sky's now the limit on contributions and there's no place in the country, however faintly competitive, at which dollars can't be thrown.

That blitz of money - more than $3bn for TV ads alone - should stagger the imagination, as should the nearly billion dollars each that the Obama and Romney crews have already raised. Then there are the multimillions pouring into mainly Republican Super PACs; the $10 million that casino magnate Sheldon Adelson and his wife Miriam gave in June to the Romney Super PAC Restore Our Future, and the $24.2 million that has followed - with Adelson reportedly pledging another $65 million, if necessary, to get Obama out of the White House; and the multi-millions the billionaire Koch brothers have poured into Americans for Prosperity.

That organisation, in turn, is funnelling $6 million into anti-Obama attack ads every two weeks and has even set up its own "ground game" - 200 permanent staff members in 32 states and thousands of volunteers armed with "sophisticated online micro-targeting tools". All of this, of course, gives the phrase "money politics" new meaning.

And then there's TV. Keep in mind that prime-time audiences were radically down this spring: CBS lost 8 per cent of its audience, Fox 20 per cent and ABC 21 per cent. What luck, then, that billions of ad dollars and eyeball-gluing programming have been flowing into the same medium as part of that heavily over-promoted reality show "Mitt vs Barack" (only one will remain standing!).

It's been an ongoing vote-'em-outta-there show that, as in the second presidential debate, has proven capable of capturing an audience of 65.6 million across the channels, the sort of numbers that stomp the Oscars and are beaten only by a few previous presidential debates and Super Bowls.

So if you own some media outfit, from the first spring Republican debates on, politics has been a never-ending Christmas. It should surprise no one, then, that the employees of those media bosses have supersized the way they are plugging election 2012. (In one of the stranger phenomena of our election moment, however, this obvious conflict of interest is never discussed, even if its reality is daily before our eyes.)

So forget the profits involved. Just sit back and enjoy an election for the ages. Only one thing could possibly be bigger: election 2016 - and the media is not even waiting for November 7 to begin handicapping that race. Articles about whether or not Billary is running are already commonplace. (Hillary's denied it. Bill's left the door ajar. Just about everybody suspects that, in the end, the answer could be yes.)

In the meantime, what a learning experience this election is proving to be. Who doesn't now know about the significance of "the suburban woman", or the "Walmart mom", or what a "four-point swing" is, or an "outlier poll", or a campaign "prebuttal" (a preemptive response to arguments not yet made), or how to judge Gallup's handiwork? Who couldn't go on and on about campaign 2012? Which, in fact, is just what's happening.

An election that outgrew us all

Still, amid all the hoopla, money, and analysis, what exactly is it? I mean this thing we still call an "election", in which our temperatures are taken every 30 seconds, in which we are told that we have more or less voted every day for months on end, in which to keep up with events you need to read daily columns by a man who lives only to make sense of this morning's batch of polls.

What does it mean when the election season never ends, when 2016 is already gestating in the oversized body of 2012? What does it mean when a candidate must spend a startling proportion of his time glad-handing the wealthiest Americans just to keep the pump primed, the campaign rolling along?

What does it mean that a "corporate strategist" - a woman working for clients who want something from the White House - prepares one of the candidates for the debates and helps plot his campaign strategy? What does it mean when the other's advisers are a walking, talking directory of lobbyists? What does it mean when you already know that the $2.5bn presidential election of 2012 will be the $3.5bn election of 2016? 

What is to be made of a phenomenon that seems to be outgrowing us all, and every explanation we have for what it is? Yes, thanks only in part to the Supreme Court, this is distinctly a 1 per cent election, but that hardly encompasses it. Yes, corporations and lobbyists are pouring their everything into it, but that can't really explain it all either. 

Yes, it's a profit centre for media owners, but no one would claim that catches the essence of it. Yes, it's an entertainment spectacle, but is that really how you'd define it? And certainly it's an everything-the-market-can-bear version of an election campaign, but does that encompass it either?

It's certainly not your grandparents' election, and you may not understand it any better than I do. But if you've been worried about Big Government, why haven't you been worrying about Big Election, too? 

The fact is: sometimes things outgrow all of us, even those who think they control them.

And here, to me, is the strangest thing: for all the trillions of words devoted to campaign 2012, no one even bothers to discuss its size. Americans may be willing to argue copiously about whether New York's Mayor Bloomberg should control the supersizing of soft drinks in his city, but not a peep is heard when it comes to the supersizing of the run for the presidency.

Under the circumstances, the slogan of ABC News seems either touchingly or mockingly silly: "Your Voice, Your Vote". Whatever this thing may be, it certainly has ever less to do with your individual voice or your individual vote. As Big Election becomes a way of life, democracy - small "d" - increasingly seems like a term from a lost time. If this is democracy, it's on steroids and on the Comedy Channel. It's our own Democratic Mockpocalypse.

I'd be the last person to claim I understand it. Still, I do know one thing: whatever it is, we're evidently going to pass right through this endless political season without stopping to take stock of our supersized political world.

How Christian Fundamentalism Feeds the Toxic Partisanship of US Politics

By Katherine Stewart, Guardian UK

29 October 12

When evangelicals attack 'the gay agenda' of an anti-bullying event in schools, something is sick in America's religious culture

ix It Up at Lunch Day is one of those programs that just seems like a nice thing to do.

The idea is that on one day of the school year, kids are invited to have lunch with the kind of kids they don't usually hang out with: the jocks mix with the nerds, lunch tables are racially integrated, et cetera. Sponsored by the Southern Poverty Law Center as part of their Teaching Tolerance division, it arose out of a broad effort to tackle the problems of bullying in the schools and bigotry in society - and it appears to have been effective in breaking down stereotypes and reducing prejudice. Over 2,000 schools nationwide now participate in the program, which is set to take place this year on 30 October.

You can argue about how permanent its effects are, or whether other approaches might be better, but the idea of making new friends in the lunchroom seems utterly benign. Right?

Wrong, as it turns out - at least, according to the American Family Association, a radical rightwing evangelical policy group. Mix It Up at Lunch Day is, in fact, part of "a nationwide push to promote the homosexual lifestyle in public schools", according to the AFA literature. The program "is an entry-level 'diversity' program designed specifically by SPCL (sic) to establish the acceptance of homosexuality into public schools, including elementary and junior high schools," warns the AFA website. "See if your child's school is on the list."

The AFA has urged parents to keep their kids home on 30 October, and claims that at least 200 schools have responded to its charge by canceling the program.

There's a backstory here. The Southern Poverty Law Center, which has fought for civil rights causes since its founding in 1971, conceived and promoted Mix It Up at Lunch as part of their Teaching Tolerance program. The SPLC also, as it happens, named the AFA, along with a dozen other "pro-family" groups, as a "hate group" in 2010, citing, among other factors, AFA's expressed views on same-sex relationships. The "homosexual agenda" is not the only factor in the SPLC's decision to include AFA on the list. AFA's director of issues analysis, Bryan Fischer, has appeared to suggest that what is biblically deemed "sexual immorality" merits punishment by death. He evidently hates Muslims, too, having recently opined that "allowing a mosque to be built in town is fundamentally no different than granting a building permit to a KKK cultural center".

So, now it's payback time. The AFA's jihad against Mix It Up at Lunch Day is its way of saying "I'm rubber, you're glue." It has come up with its own list of boycotts and hate groups, and sure enough the SPLC, on account of its "incendiary language", is on that list.

Funny word games aside, the SPLC is right. It is, by now, well known that the AFA and the kind of interests they represent spread conspiratorial falsehoods about the LGBT community, placing blame for a wide variety of social ills on a "gay agenda". They also seem to support a certain type of bullying and bigotry in public schools - the faith-based kind - and believe there should be more of it.

One example comes from an AFA cultural ally: Gateways to Better Education, formed in 1991 by Focus on the Family in tandem with a rightwing Christian legal advocacy group that calls itself the Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF). Gateways publishes a "Guide for Commemorating Religious Freedom at School". But the freedom Gateways and the ADF have in mind applies only to those who share their religion.

"Religious Freedom Day is not 'celebrate-our-diversity-day,'" members are reminded. Gateways advocates a "Biblical approach to tolerance", which apparently consists of intolerant attitudes toward what the ADF and Gateways call "pro-homosexual education" and "the gay activist agenda". Parents' No 1 goal, they say, should be to "encourage your children to be bolder" in expressing their faith at school.

The far right's fixation on same-sex relationships is so ludicrous that it defines a sub-category of camp. But let's take a step back for a moment. The big question, the one that keeps coming back in every one of these skirmishes in the culture wars, is: why is the loudest religion in American politics today so much about hate?

Consider Mix it Up at Lunch Day from the perspective of the almost limitless other conceptions of the Christian religion that are out there. You could, for example, construe it as an exercise in "loving thy neighbor". You could quote the gospel of John that "God is love." You could view it as part of the religious mission of charity. I have no doubt that there are countless Christian and non-Christian people in the US who would view Mix It Up Day in just this way.

So why does the form of religion that seeks to claim the term "Christian" in the political realm have to focus so relentlessly on a "gay conspiracy" - not to mention sexually active singles and the purely evil Muslims?

I don't believe for a moment that this hysterical voice that screeches in America's political sphere is the authentic voice of religion in America. Most religious Americans want to mix it up at lunch! They want to make friends across party lines, and they want to help people who are less fortunate. A survey by the Public Religious Research Institute, released on 24 October, reveals that 60% of Catholics believe the Church should place a greater emphasis on social justice issues and their obligation to the poor, even if that means focusing less on culture war issues such as abortion and same-sex marriage. Earlier this year, in response to the Ryan budget, the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops joined other Christian leaders in insisting that a "circle of protection" be drawn around "essential programs that serve poor and vulnerable people".

So why is it that the so-called "values voters" are urged to vote against the politician who supports choice, not the politician who wants to shred that "circle of protection" for the poor and vulnerable? Why is it that when politicians want to demonstrate just how religiously righteous they are, they talk about banning same-sex marriage and making contraceptives hard to get, instead of showing what they have done to protect the weak?

There is an obvious answer, and it is, in a sense, staring you in the face every time you watch a political debate or read about the latest antics of Focus on the Family and the AFA. The kind of religion that succeeds in politics tends to focus on the divisive element of religion. If you want to use religion to advance a partisan political agenda, the main objective you use it for is to divide people between us and them, between the in-group and the out-group, the believers and the infidels.

The result is a reduction of religion to a small handful of wedge issues. According to the religious leaders and policy organizations urging Americans to vote with their "Biblical values", to be Christian now means to support one or, at most, a small handful of policy positions. And it means voting for the Republican party.

This type of rhetoric is also championed by a segment of Jewish conservatives. Alarmed that Obama won 78% of the Jewish vote in 2008, they accused Democratic Jews of being "Jinos" - Jews In Name Only. "They eat bagels and lox; they watch 'Schindler's List,'" writes Town Hall columnist Ben Shapiro, "but they do not care about Israel" - at least, not in the way that Shapiro thinks we should.

When religion is thus reduced to a single policy decision and support for a political party, it becomes shrill and bigoted. This abuse of religion for political purposes has been tremendously damaging for American politics. But it is worth pointing out that it has been destructive of religion, too. According to another poll this month, this one by the Pew Research Center, record numbers of Americans are now reporting that they have no particular religious affiliation. Perhaps that is because, right now, the God of hate seems to be shouting louder than the God of love.