- "Regime Change" in the United States Will Occur Not Through Kerry's Election but When and If New Policies Change the Country's Direction...
- After November 2nd, the Burden Will Remain on We, the People, to Utilize the New Spaces Opened by the Defeat of Bush to Create, from Below, a New Context with which a Kerry Administration Will Have to Act...
- The Discussion of What We Will Do, if Kerry Wins, Begins Now...
The strong showing in Miami at the first presidential debate by Democratic nominee John Kerry - besting George W. Bush on his own turf of foreign policy - confirms all my beliefs of earlier this year: that if anyone in the United States can beat Bush on November 2nd it is Kerry.
Like many folks - certainly like most Americans living abroad (and whose only tenuous claims to residency in my own country are in the "safe" blue states of Massachusetts and New York) - I feel mostly powerless to determine the outcome of that vote. But after a long, boring, content-less summer campaign, I'm waking up to the political process underway North of the Border again with a glimmer in my eye that maybe, just maybe, the un-elected tyrant Bush will fall... and fall hard.
It's show time for Kerry: the hour when, in his past campaigns, he has come from behind to slash the tires of his opponent, squeak past him, and cross the finish line first. (Against as dirty a fighter as Bush, Kerry should feel no moral hesitation at all in playing even dirtier to win.) I'm betting - as I did last December and January in the Democratic primaries - that Kerry takes the November election decisively.
If that occurs, we will greet November 3rd bleary-eyed with a new swathe of possibilities both for hope and for disappointment. What will a President Kerry do about Iraq? The drug war? Latin America? Will a President Kerry be able to adapt to the world's fast-changing economic landscape in which nations with small and mid-sized economies are throwing the imposition of unfair "free" trade deals back in the faces of Washington and Wall Street?
The imposed sameness on all economies was still pronounced as inevitable just five years ago. But now it has, on a trajectory from Seattle 1999 to Cancun 2003 to Caracas 2004, crashed on the rocks of reality. Democracy and "free" markets are not Siamese twins: they are, rather, in a permanent and messy rivalry. There will surely be cases, over the next four years, in which a President Kerry, if he means his pro-democracy rhetoric, will have to reject the Clinton-Bush economic fundamentalism of recent years and choose democracy...
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