Bush, Clinton, Bush … Clinton? Is This Democracy?
2 comments September 28th, 2007
The Associated Press has published a timely story, headlined “Bush, Clinton, Bush … Clinton?” The story echoes the concerns raised in my book, “Hillary Clinton Nude,” that the election of a second Clinton presidency in the USA raises serious doubts about the viability of American democracy. The AP article quotes Princeton University political historian Julian Zelizer, who said, “We now have a younger generation and middle-age generation who are going to think about national politics through the Bush-Clinton prism.”
The AP writer, Nancy Benac, offered the following observations in her article:
“Already, for 116 million Americans, there has never been a time when there wasn’t a Bush or Clinton in the White House, either as president or vice president. Does a nation of 303 million people really have only two families qualified to run the show?”
The answer is clearly an emphatic “No!” Furthermore, as I argue in my book, the Bill Clinton, George W. Bush and Hillary Clinton are far from being the most qualified in the nation to serve as president. The real question then is how come this sad state of affairs has evolved to our current surreal reality? Ms. Benac points towards the answer by her reference to “branding” of these two political families. I go much further in “Hillary Clinton Nude.” In my view, celebrity politics has destroyed meritocracy as the means of political succession in the republic. Hillary Clinton’s status as front-runner in the 2008 presidential campaign is based on her skill at exploiting her celebrity status, and not from “accomplishments,” such as Hillary’s vote in favor of the disastrous invasion of Iraq.
What both my book and the AP story reveal is that America’s Two Party political system has degenerated into a Two Family system. Surely, this is not what America’s founding fathers had in mind when they conceived of the world’s first constitutional republic.
