Bush people and Kerry’s team are slugging it out real hard to secure victory in the US election; and the entire world is witnessing the tussle with edginess
PRESIDENT Musharraf, we all know, would want his buddy back in the White House. Crawford Farm and Camp David would be nice to revisit; as would Sehba and Laura’s exchange of hubby stories, recipes, and fashion tips.
Two days to go folks and we will know which candidate will lecture the world from the Oval Office pulpit — on America’s freedoms and dreams; democracy and peace, boring the hell out of us for the coming four years.
Prime Minister Shaukat Aziz, too, must have his ‘tellers’ fingers crossed. He likes Bush, the folksy Texan, whose men recommended the former Citibank executive to Musharraf. Pakistan’s reserves have steadily gone up, thanks to the largess of the Bush administration, we’re still hoping to hunt down Osama for them and get a couple more millions in return. We need the extra dollop, now that the rupee has begun its downward slide and the Aziz government, desperate to stall the situation, has already sold around $400 million from its foreign exchange reserves in the last two months.
Many in America have brought out their prayer rugs and rosary beads, because they fear if Bush goes, so will their funding. The touter-in-chief, Reverend Pat Robertson, who foulmouthed our Holy Prophet after 9/11 on national TV and got away with it, is furiously lobbying for Bush. He calls him a messenger of God. “God’s blessing is on him,” the evangelist says, adding, “It’s the blessing of heaven on the emperor.”
But even Robertson is watching the exit polls and has already watered down his ringing prophesy: in January this year he barked that Bush will get a walkover, “I really believe I’m hearing from the Lord it’s going to be a blowout election in 2004.” Now, the so-called ‘pillar of Christian love’ admits, “I thought it was going to be a blowout, but I think it’s razor thin now.”
Both Bush and Kerry look terribly pasty. What do you think? They are exhausted (as are we) shouting the same tired half-truths, while their TV ads get more vicious. The latest Bush advertisement uses the imagery of prowling wolves to suggest that under John Kerry the country will be more vulnerable to terrorists because “weakness attracts those who are waiting to do America harm”.
Where’s the excitement? Where’s the thrill? It’s missing. The big six media outlets owned by corporations with their own political agenda to push have nothing newsy to offer their audiences. Instead, the media is hyperventilating the flu vaccine shortage and driving fear in over 65-year-olds of impending death and doom should they contract the virus.
However, up on Capitol Hill, every congressman and his caboodle, including lithe little blonde interns, have been safely vaccinated, making the Senate and House a no flu zone. How about that? I thought, it was only in Pakistan that parliamentarians, especially belonging to the ruling party, led charmed lives. So, what’s going to happen should Bush win? “By God, we won! They lost! We’ve reclaimed the White House. It’s kind of validation of everything we did in the first term, and so it’s full speed ahead,” will be the victory stump speech of the Bush team. Having suspended their realistic judgment of what lies ahead, all we’ll hear, predict many, is: “By God, the world is ours.”
The “dream team” is staying? White House insiders say that George W is not enamoured with “infusion of new people, new blood”. He wants to hang out with the same oldies.
He’s very happy with them and really not interested in doing a spring-cleaning. Obviously, he can’t declare that “I made mistakes here, there, we’re going to change focus on policy and therefore we’re going to bring in completely different individuals who will signal that I made a mistake” say White House watchers.
Donald Rumsfeld, the dinosaur, we’re told is here to stay as defence secretary. He’s “very eager, even at age 72, to finish the military reform, reorganization that he set his mind to, and that people have persuaded him that he is uniquely qualified to complete.”
Except, there’s a slight problem here: Condi Rice, the national security chief, wants Rumsfeld’s job! She’s so tight with Bush that she once called him her husband. Freudian slip, eh? The African-American has made it known that she’s had enough as his national security adviser, nor is she interested in grabbing Powell’s job for she really has very little patience for ambassadors and diplomats, but will not mind elbowing Rumsfeld out of the Pentagon.
Gen Colin Powell has begun his march on The World Bank. According to an eyewitness report, the reporter saw World Bank president Wolfensohn and Powell together at the White House’s correspondents dinner, “and they were playing with each other, you know, Wolfensohn like was taking a piece of paper out of his coat and handing it to Colin Powell and saying ‘Will you sign your contract now’, and they went ha, ha, ha, as is their wont.” The talk is that the office has been repainted and waiting for him. Powell has been a passive and frustrated secretary of state, yet at times he sort of “wakes up and gets very aggressive and excited again and tries to do good, because that’s really what he wants to do.” Instead of hanging around Bush in his last days, he took off for Asia trying to revive the six-party talks involving North Korea! Kind of weird? But the one fellow no one wants is the dour Attorney-General Ashcroft. While Bush would like to use the second term to make permanent the Patriot Act, maybe he needs a different kind of ‘spear carrier’, because many Republicans think that John Ashcroft single-handedly did more to damage the party’s reputation with civil liberties and on immigration issues. Also, they don’t want the Patriot Act reauthorized.
The Senate and the House of Representatives will almost certainly have a Republican majority, but the “margins will be narrow, it will not be filibuster-proof in the Senate, and there is restiveness among some Republicans on grounds domestic and foreign”.
So will Bush pick up more fights with his axis of evil gang? Many think, the US, despite being the most powerful country in the world, can’t “walk and chew gum” at the same time. In other words Washington simply cannot afford to tangle itself in other wars. Iraq has “really strained our abilities, strained our ability to recruiting, a lot of people don’t want to sign up, the ‘stop loss’ has infuriated people. Really, a lot of problems, a lot of challenges of manpower.”
John Kerry, on the other hand, as a four-year-old, picked up an experience that has influenced the way he thinks today. His mother, Rosemary Forbes had grown up on the Brittany coast of France, but during World War II the Nazis took over the house, she escaped by bicycle to Paris and fled to America where she married Richard Kerry. Forbes returned to her old home in France, taking John Kerry, four, with her. The US army had driven the Nazis out of the house, but it was destroyed and Kerry remembers seeing shards of glass on the ground with bunkers and mines still around.
“And so John Kerry learnt the lesson that the US military can be a force for good, for greatness. Imagine if your mother’s house had been rescued by the US military?” says a defence analyst.
Forty years ago, a friend of John Kerry introduced him to his mother, saying, “This is Johnny Kerry, he’s going to be president of the United States one day.”
Bush people and Kerry’s team are slugging it out real hard to secure victory in the US election; and the entire world is witnessing the tussle with edginess
