The peasants are angry and they're taking up pitchforks and torches! It's the march of the Independents, America's new Minute Men, and they're looking for a New Deal.
We saw what the Indies and their newcomer cousins, the youth vote, did for Obama in Iowa. Tonight will show whether Iowa was a fluke or just the spark of a movement that will sweep America through the November elections.
Early indications suggest the Indies are out in force in New Hampshire today. In 2000 New Hampshire Indies flocked to McCain. He's still the most popular Repug in that state. The question is whether this bunch will stay with the man who backs endless war in Iraq or split to the new guy, Obama?
I'm old enough to remember every US presidential campaign since Kennedy/Nixon. My Dad brought home our first TV when Eisenhower was president and, where I was brought up, we had CBC and the Big Three American nets - CBS, NBC and ABC. That meant you got to see a lot of American politics, like it or not. I watched every election since and I have to say that this one is shaping up to be the most intriguing since Kennedy. Whether it will live up to its early promise is unclear but it's off to a damn good start.
A darkness has steadily descended on America over those decades. Lewis Lapham has written that democracy in his country fell into decline in the Nixon years when wealth came to be equated with virtue. When you think that one through, it's a compelling point. The gap between rich and poor; the decline of the middle class; vast social inequities; the insinuation of a fourth branch of government - the lobbyists; wholesale manipulation of the nation's media; rigged elections and ballot box fraud straight out of the Third World; utterly ludicrous and yet massive financial gambits such as the Savings & Loans scandal, the Enron and WorldCom disease, the dot.com era, the housing and subprime debacle; the gutting of American industry deceptively smoothed over by an abundant supply of cheap foreign loans; wars without end launched on a web of lies; the squandering of America's treasure at home and its reputation and regard abroad. Put those all together and tell me who wouldn't want a revolution, an entirely New Deal?
I have watched America go through all these things and more in its transformation from a respected democracy, serving the needs and interests of the American people, into an often-reviled oligarchy, catering to the well-being and advancement of the most advantaged few.
Restoring government of the people, by the people and for the people (doesn't that sound positively leftist?) isn't going to be achieved in one election. Putting America back again will be at last a generational challenge. But the process has to begin somewhere, sometime and that moment may have arrived.
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