Dispatch #9

Well, that didn’t take long—only forever. This week Newt Gingrich suspended his campaign and cut his staff back significantly. Big names in the party, like the Bush family, have begun to endorse Mitt Romney publicly, and the rhetoric against him has been toned down and ratcheted up against Barack Obama. Romney says little himself, which helps, because when he does open his mouth, he’s prone to gaffe whenever he’s not “on message,” that is to say, whenever he’s not giving bland and unconvincing voice to party ideology or permitting his superPAC (political action committee: Restore Our Future) to trash his rivals with attack ads. So the Republican primary campaign, which has been described as a circus, as bad reality television, and as a train wreck, begins to close out. The GOP hopes to forgive and forget amongst themselves and move on against Obama; it will be the Democrats’ pleasure to remind them and the rest of America what they have just been through and whom they have come up with as a result.

American media is not a thoughtful forum for political discourse. As one observer has noticed, “In the United States general doctrines concerning religion, philosophy, morality, and even politics do not vary at all, or at least are only modified by the slow and unconscious working of some hidden process. Even the crudest prejudices take an unconscionable time to efface, in spite of all the froth and stir of men and things.” The froth and stir of the Republican primary process will be succeeded by the froth and stir of the general election process into November, both very public, fulsome of sound and furious—and expensive. All content of which will be to little avail. The slow, unconscious, and hidden process to which Alexis de Tocqueville (II, 21, 640) referred over a century and a half ago has become, in this century, at this moment, the slow and hidden process of economic recovery. If it is mending, Mr. Obama will be reelected.

The more important conversation in American political discourse this week was the clash of arguments made before the Supreme Court on the constitutionality of the Obama administration’s health care legislation. As most of the world knows, the health care and health insurance system in the United States is one of the worst in the industrialized world, and the law passed by Congress two years ago when Democrats had clear majorities in the House and Senate was the second attempt on their part (Democrats had failed to enact health care legislation during the first Clinton administration) to address this embarrassing situation. Like most large-scale legislation, the Affordable Health Care Act is complex, cumbersome, contradictory. The constitutional, legal, and political niceties are too complicated to even begin to address here and may not even be comprehensible at all, but however the Court decides—and Court-watchers are mindful about not trying to read its mind before it speaks it in June—the Court will decide the issues 5-4, revealing that it is as divided as the country, as partisan and as immoveable.