Interesting article

La Jornada, Mexico



Erosion of the Political Class

EDITORIAL

January 09, 2008

Mexico - La Jornada - Original Article (Spanish)

The figures that seemed to be the favorites to get the Democratic and Republican presidential nominations, Hillary Rodham Clinton and Rudolph Giuliani, respectively, have experienced serious setbacks in the first primary elections in the neighboring country [U.S.], in Iowa and New Hampshire. In the first of those states, the senator and wife of former president Bill Clinton was relegated back to third place, after Barack Obama and John Edwards; as such, on the Republican side the former mayor of New York, who at the beginning of the primaries appeared to be the candidate with the greatest possibilities, went to a distant fourth place.



In New Hampshire, Rodham Clinton achieved a Pyrrhic victory over Obama - the victory points over him do not mean any additional delegates for the party convention- and the Republican John McCain presented himself as a viable candidate, with a six point lead over his closest competitor, the Mormon extreme right-wing Mitt Romney; left in third place was Mike Huckabee, a strong candidate from the Protestant right, who had come in first in Iowa. In the national arena, Obama, senator from Illinois, has widely overtaken the New York senator Rodham Clinton.



Nothing has been written yet, in spite of the fact that the elections yesterday are famous for predicting the results of the national presidential elections. The largest part of the primaries still remains and in the process the candidates will put into play all types of resources: political marketing factors, corporate control over voters, and a wide range of media blows. But the start of the election battle in the United States seems to express voter frustrations with the traditional political actors and the figures of the establishment, and the tendency to take a gamble with new figures that are relatively unconnected to Washington’s political life, as with Obama, and individuals unconnected with George W. Bush’s administration, such as McCain. Such phenomena are explained, in part, by the weakening of the traditional groups that have controlled American institutions for decades.



The reasons for taking this chance are evident, and as follows: the extreme right-wing and corporate fundamentalism that is representative of the current occupant of the White House has driven the country to unprecedented disaster on almost all fronts: economic, political, diplomatic, social, institutional and also, of course, geostrategy and military, in as much as the superpower finds itself entangled in illegal wars and atrocities against various groups and countries.



From another viewpoint, the severe difficulties that the Democratic senator Rodham Clinton has faced in order to win the candidacy that a few weeks ago she seemed to have practically in the bag follow from the nonconformity of important sectors of the citizenry-- women, youth, and minorities, for example—in the face of the clean-up done by the Clintons regarding finance and business interests, evident since the second term of Bill Clinton as president. Perhaps this would explains the uneasiness with the not very appealing perspective of those two families- the Bushes and the Clintons- alternating in the White House during a quarter of a century and establishing in this way, forms of power particular to modern dynasties of democracy.



The rest of the world should not have too many expectations for the moderation of McCain and his relations with migrants, or for the apparent opening for Obama and his ethnic origins: all the candidates for the Presidency with real possibilities are, in the end, compromised by the current Imperial model of the United States for many years

http://www.watchingamerica.com/lajornada000086.shtml
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"the Mormon extreme right-wing Mitt Romney;"

Doesn't sound like they like him much