It seems like months--because it has--since we started the campaign seasons in Iowa and New Hampshire and much empty rhetoric and vitriolic attacks have come from Hillary and Obama and the guy with all the hair from North Carolina and Mitt and Huck and Rudi and all the rest. And we still have a month to go before people in these two little states cast votes and the national media makes too much about it, and so on. Why Iowa and New Hampshire--states more white and rural than the nation as a whole--continue to be allowed so much of a share of choosing the fate of our nation for so many decades has eluded me.
But some friend pointed out the other day that if we started the primaries in big states the internecine sniping and personal mudslinging would just be worse, as the candidates would sink to telling their stories entirely in 30 second attack ads instead of actually going around and showing their faces to the hoi polloi.
I suppose we should just be happy that we have reasonably fair elections, given that nations like Russia--which had a promising democratic turnaround in the early 1990's--is now headed back toward traditional autocracy.
A lot of this had to do with the lackluster performance of the Russian economy back in the tenure of Boris Yeltsin and the outbreak of a "cleptocracy" of mostly Kremlin-sponsored oligarchs who took predatory capitalism to new heights like oil and natural gas extraction.
Now, Vladimir Putin is the big cheese and he is not so slowly consolidating his power base around a tried-and-true Russian formula of projecting and protecting centralized power from Moscow, combined with anti-West scoldings of the US. Add this to jailing and intimidating journalists and media outlets, plus anyone powerful enough in the economy to put a dent in his plans and you have a guy CNN rightly calls "Czar Putin".
His party (We Are Russia) has, according to recent news reports, pretty much stuffed the ballot boxes from St. Petersburg to Vladivostok and thugs out scaring enough blocs of voters in other key parts of Russia to create a landslicde. So now, whatever the will of ther people--and their is genuine support for a strong leader like Putin among many in Russia--Putin's party got 70 percent of the vote. Although he's supposed to step down in a couple years, its Vlad the ex-KGB boy who will be the Real Power in the Kremlin and the Duma for a long time, no matter which puppet he picks to actually serve as President.
Suddenly, all that pandering and petty sniping from Huck, Barack, Hillary and Mitt and all their power hungry cadres of panderers and character assassins in Des Moines and Manchester seems just a little more tolerable when you see the consolidation of fear tactics and heavy-handedness that is going on in the snows and steppes of what was once a potentially-reformable, major "democratic" nation.
Russia is a world power once again; but the U.S. and Russian relationship is not quite as bad as it was in the cold war-not yet anyway. The U.S. and the west blew its chances after the fall of the Soviet Union. I always felt that major western countries could done a lot more to help Russia onto its feet. Now it has fallen back into the past.
ReplyDeleteI agree with that. The period of transition from Communism in Russia was quite hard on average citizens and their political infastructure was compromised by cronyism under Yeltsin. Now the "strong man" form of government has returned.
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