No confidence should mean new leadership
Some "democracy" that we Americans are trying to shove down the Iraqi people's throats at gunpoint.
Canadians and Israelis soon will vote in order to reassemble their governments before they normally would -- Canadian Prime Minister Paul Martin last month was shot down by the Canadian parliament with a vote of no confidence, forcing a new election in January, and Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon last month left the right-wing Likud party to form a new moderate party (the Kadima party) and dissolved parliament; Israelis will elect a new parliament in March.
It's a bit messy, the parliamentarian system, what with elections having to be held irregularly, but the parliamentarian system is a hell of a lot more responsive to the needs of the democracy it serves than is the United States' two-party, winner-take-all system. We Americans, barring his impeachment by the U.S. House of Representatives and his subsequent removal from office by the U.S. Senate, are stuck with George W. Bush for the next three years.
Bush knew that we Americans were screwed when he boasted in November 2004, after his razor-thin "re"-election (he and his henchpeople called his 50.7 percent of the popular vote a "mandate"), that he had passed his "accountability moment." Every fucking day should be an "accountability moment" for a U.S. president, but clearly Bush saw only Election Day 2004 as the day that he ever had to answer to the American people.
In his current column, Ted Rall says that Americans should be able to recall their president, as Californians recalled Democratic Gov. Gray Davis in October 2003 and replaced him with Repugnican Arnold Schwarzenegger (who, like George W. Bush, now enjoys approval ratings of below 40 percent). Rall writes:
By August 2003 California Gov. Gray Davis' approval rating had plunged to 22 percent. Two months later, he lost a special recall election.
Now it's George W. Bush's turn to take a drubbing. The latest CNN/USA Today/Gallup poll finds that only 37 percent of Americans think he's doing a good job, a record low for him and a dangerous drop below the historical benchmark of 40 percent.
"When a president falls below 40 percent approval in public opinion polls -- as President Bush has done twice in the past two months -- it's usually a sign of serious political danger," writes Richard Benedetto in USA Today. "Since 1950, five of the eight other presidents who fell below 40 percent -- Harry Truman, Lyndon Johnson, Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter and George H.W. Bush -- lost their bids for reelection or opted not to run again. A sixth, Richard Nixon, was overwhelmed by the Watergate scandal and resigned. Only two, Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton, turned things around."
But even Clinton never regained his former appeal. His hand-picked successor, vice president Al Gore, won the 2000 election by such a narrow margin that Republicans were able to steal it away.
The "political capital" Bush claimed after the 2004 election has vanished over the last year. Dead Americans piled up in Iraq and New Orleans, his closest political allies were indicted for corruption and treason, gas prices soared and his party's right-wing Christianists stabbed him in the back over the Harriet Miers' nomination.
All of Bush's best-laid plans -- to privatize Social Security, pass another round of tax cuts for the wealthy and possibly expand his wars to Syria and Iran -- lie in ruins.
And it's only going to get worse now that his moderate and centrist Republican allies in Congress are beginning to peel away: some to appeal to swing voters in next year's midterm elections, others to align themselves with John McCain's incipient 2008 presidential campaign, and some simply because Bush's poll numbers make him radioactive.
George W. Bush, a tiger who so recently assigned himself the right to assassinate American citizens at will, has been defanged. He's as pathetic and powerless as Saddam Hussein. He is done.
"Lame duck" doesn't cut it. Unless Bush resigns, the world's sole superpower faces the dismal prospect of three long years under a dead duck president. Who will extract us from two losing wars? How will we pay off the $8 trillion national debt he ran up? America needs a strong president yesterday.
Bush could save himself and the nation three years of marking time by resigning. Or Congress could do the right thing and impeach him for his countless crimes. Maybe Bush and Cheney will get indicted for their roles in outing CIA agent Valerie Plame. But our constitutional system only allows for impeaching individuals, not whole administrations....
One solution is to establish a California-style recall system on the national level. If a significant percentage of Americans loses confidence in the president and his administration to the extent that they're willing to sign a recall petition, a special election should be held within three months.
The number of required signatures should be high enough -- California's system calls for 12 percent of the number of people who cast votes in the preceding election -- to ensure that recalls are only held as the result of widespread disgust among the citizenry.
To avoid disruption, the constitutional amendment creating the recall provision could prevent such elections from being held more often than, say, annually. And a recall won't automatically result in a new party taking over the White House -- just a new administration. But it would replace our current system of political stagnation with a more dynamic democracy.
The threat of recall would make sitting leaders responsive to the people more often than the current four-year election cycle, and would allow disastrous and unpopular leaders like Bush to be replaced posthaste.
Of course, national recall elections wouldn't guarantee that the people would always be happy with their [new] leaders. Arnold Schwarzenegger, the man who replaced Gray Davis after the recall, currently "ranks among the most unpopular governors in modern California history," reports the San Francisco Chronicle.
But Californians don't have to wait until the next election to get rid of him.
Well, the majority of us Californians hate Ahhhnuld Schwarzenegger -- who promised to help "the people" but who, Bush-style, has only helped out his big-business cronies (oh, big shock there, a Repugnican lying about to whom his real allegiance lies) -- but we get to boot him out in November 2006 (and we will), so we don't need another recall election right now.
Besides, the October 2003 gubernatorial recall election, while legal, was dirty: The signature-gathering for the recall was financed by Repugnicans who wanted a do-over of the November 2002 election in which Davis had been re-elected. Davis never was accused of any criminal wrongdoing, but was wrongly blamed for the thievery that fraudulent energy corporation Enron, a subsidiary of BushCheneyCorp, perpetrated upon California. Stupidly, Californians thought that Ahhhnuld Schwarzenegger, another subsidiary of BushCheneyCorp, would be the man to fix what Enron had broken.
As much as I would like to have seen Ahhhnuld recalled, it would have started a spate of California gubernatorial recall elections inspired primarily by partisan revenge, and that wouldn't be good for the state.
But I'd love to see the recall process, which is incorporated in California's and other states' constitutions, to be incorporated into the U.S. Constitution.
As Rall notes, it would keep U.S. presidents on their toes. They couldn't have one "accountability moment" and then coast for the next four years. They'd have to be responsive to the American people all of the time, as they're fucking supposed to be. And if they lost the confidence of the American people, as Bush has done*, a recall election could restore the American people's confidence in their president.
Impeachment, a political process, isn't enough. If it were up to the American people in a presidential recall election, Bush would be sent packing back to Crawford, Texas, but because the U.S. House of Representatives is controlled by Repugnicans -- largely if not wholly because of the illegal redistricting in Texas that was orchestrated by Tom DeLay & Co. and that put more U.S. House seats in the hands of Repugnicans, as it was supposed to do -- we Americans are stuck with Bush at least until and unless the Democrats take back the House in November 2006 and then impeach him.
Incorporating the recall process into the U.S. Constitution would be just a start, of course.
The two-party, winner-take-all system -- which has enabled the Repugnican Party to abuse its power to the point that Americans are now stuck with a president they don't want -- needs to go. I'd like to see proportional representation in the United States. Proportional representation would offer Americans real choices and real representation and would break the stranglehold that the two major parties have on American politics and on American government.
Then, perhaps, we Americans could lecture other nations on the topic of democracy.
*The highest approval rating that Bush has received in any nationwide poll taken within the last month is 42 percent (and that's a FOX poll, and I don't trust FOX polls; I trust the other polls, the majority of which put Bush at under 40 percent ).
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