|
Internet Dictates New Rules In the Political Game By: Lorenzo Dee Belveal (December 5, 1998) A variety of responses have greeted my earlier comments concerning the matters that now occupy the attention of the press, and countless students of law, government, human behavior and political science. A great many people who might be presumed to know better, are devoting important amounts of time to debating the "impeachable" nature of President Clinton’s relationship with Ms. Lewinsky, or lack of it. They presumably see this as an opportunity to exercise their personal analytic and prophetic powers. To the surprise and deep disappointment of many of us, almost every aspect of President Clinton's misadventure with Ms. Lewinsky has been addressed, with the exception of the most important one of all: What the voters think about the issue of impeachment. This novel national embarrassment seems to be about sex, but its ramifications reach far out in all directions from the sorry impasse at which we presently find ourselves. Allow me to recite a modest bit of history, to provide a foundation for the remarks to follow. It’s hard to overestimate the importance of this contest, since this assignation puts us at grips with the next stage of our national existence. The United States has long and erroneously been characterized as a Democracy. It is not. It was launched and ordained as a Republic, because there was no feasible alternative at the time, when the founding fathers broke with the British Crown, in favor of establishing a separate, independent, sovereign nation. It was a Republic they swore to support with "their lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honor". Whenever "Democracy" was mentioned for the next two-hundred years, it was an an informality, rather than a functional political reality. The Continental Congress convened in Philadelphia, on that fateful July 4, 1776. It's participants came from hundreds of miles away, in order to take part. They had no choice. Without telephones, telegraph, or mail services, unless they were on hand in person, the meeting could not be convened. So they came on horseback, in carriages, and on foot - from places as distant as Georgia, on the south, and New Hampshire, on the north, and everywhere in between. This is the way the first Congress was convened, out of necessity. This is the way it has continued, out of custom and habit. The machinery of our government has continued to work on the basis of "political representation", because, until now, there has never been a feasible method for directly involving the individual voters in the enactment of laws. The closest we have ever come to directly involving the "grass roots" in the promulgation of laws has been in the invocation of "initiative, referendum and recall." And also, there is the required process of local ratification (by states) of Amendments to the Constitution, as a prerequisite to their activation as laws of the land. Except for these few highly unusual "emergency" processes, our institutions of government are carried out - on our behalf - by elected and appointed surrogates, bearing titles like senator, congressman, commissioner, judge, vice-president and president. But whatever their titles and however awesome the powers and perquisites of their respective offices, every move they make is in the name of "The People of the United States of America". This, because all of the power of our nation is vested in the people, and only surrendered to our representatives for specified periods of time, for the accomplishment of their carefully defined activities, and only during their full and faithful performance of such activities as the people, from time to time, direct. These modest guidelines set out the essential political ground-rules for a Republic. These rules recognized the harsh realities that faced a far-flung population, with neither communications nor transportation, when the United States of America was born, some two-hundred and twenty-two years ago. But now we are only a mere four-hundred days before the dawn of the third millennium A. D., and much has changed. Most importantly, the very strictures that dictated a Republican form of government for the fledgling nation have been vastly altered. To pretend that these changes are separate and apart from the functions and political relationships that comprise our federal machine, is to ignore palpable reality. Politics change, along with the rest of the worldly realities. Now our nation is cross-hatched by super-highways, railroads, and airlines. There are hundreds - or thousands - of itinerary, route, and means of transport, by which we can cover the distances from border to border and coast to coast. Such a trip can be accomplished in a few days or a few hours, depending on the relative urgencies involved. The result is that our once expansive country is now magically shrunken, by a mind-boggling array of public conveniences and hi-tech miracles. Truth to tell, many of the considerations that placed "Democracy" outside the realm of reasonable consideration two-hundred years ago, no longer stand as bars to the kind of direct, personal, citizen participation which is the distinguishing operational characteristic of a true Democracy. We travel more efficiently and more comfortably, over much greater distances than ever before. We can communicate directly and immediately - in real-time - with anyone on earth who happens to have a link to the World Wide Web. This is the crux of our new political milieu. We don't need to travel at all, in order to personally participate in meetings, conferences, conclaves and conventions, whether social, personal, political or governmental. Telephonic communications, closed-circuit television, satellite- anchored planetary systems and cyber-links join individuals in face-to-face audio/video encounters as effortlessly, or more easily, than assembling a similar number of people in a single mid-city location. Information exchanging and sharing, which a just few years ago constituted the greatest single bottleneck in decentralizing business-management, is now virtually automatic and available to everyone. Variations on the computerized LAN theme (Local Area Networking) and WAN (Wide Area Networking) ties the functional segments of a corporation, a school district or police department, a Defense Establishment, or a global marketing organization together as closely as if the entire enterprise was housed under a common roof. Distance is no longer a crippling disadvantage. Fifty "physical" feet without a communications link, is farther than five-thousand miles, with the proper communications equipment in place. Do not think of cyber-links as "bridging" distance. Cyber-linking obviates (think: "removes") distance. Which brings us to the unavoidable conclusion, that the United States of America is no longer laced into the geographic straightjacket that once imposed great distances between individuals and made person-to-person contact impossible - except on rare occasions. And that, therefore, necessarily dictated the Republican structure of our nation in its beginnings. Granting this, and who can deny it, no longer is it a de-facto necessity that decisions of government must be taken by elected representatives, with little or no direct contact, input or participation on the part of the electorate. No longer need the essential functions of private citizenship be limited to marking ballots at designated intervals and, in the periods between elections, surrendering their political well-being to elected surrogates. Surrogates, it is worth mentioning, whose principal claim to usefulness is their self-anointed presumption that they are better judges of what is good for their constituents, than are their constituents, themselves. A dramatic change takes place in the mental processes of a candidate who wins election. To an office that calls for a Washington, D. C. postal address, especially. It's almost as if something snaps in their minds, and that replaces the fact of election, with the illusion of divine ordination. I have heard this political metamorphosis referred to as a "Christ Complex". That label is hard to improve on. Symptoms of the Christ Complex are being magnificently displayed in the ongoing jousting between the forces aligned with Independent Counsel Ken Starr, who are clearly bent on turning the President of the United States out of office; and defying the public - who patently have decided the drama has already lasted too long, cost too much, and gone too far down the scatological road to shameless and gratuitous national embarrassment. These opposing attitudes are altogether too obvious to require debate. The Internet provides a means of constantly sampling public attitudes in this regard. For many months, every polled indication has reflected a progressively declining public esteem for Mr. Starr and his four-year-old inquisition. We have seen steadily increasing popular support for the idea of calling a halt to the political bloodbath, calling off the political attack-dogs, in favor of letting the President get on with his job. The numbers in support of these attitudes are too great to brook argument. The voters of this country are tired of the Starr scenario - and especially, they are tired of paying for it. They clearly are no longer interested in a detailed and repeated public explanations of the arts and intimate processes of oral sex, as the lead story on their Evening News. But Judge Starr and his political loyalists pursues their destructive ends with a singleness of purpose that can only be explained on the basis of obsession. They seem utterly fixated on his illusory objective, regardless of the clearly demonstrated failures to unearth anything notably significant, from his Herculean labors in the political Aegean stable. Neither does the clear disenchantment of the public with his investigative excesses make a dent in his one-track mind-set. He shows every intention of pursuing his mirage of impeachable presidential wrong-doing to the last inch of his real or imagined authority. And this, regardless of whether the voters like his program or not! It's time to acknowledge that, other pretenders to supreme authority to the contrary, notwithstanding, ours is a nation "of the people, by the people, and for the people". Public officials function by the authority and at the pleasure of the citizens of this nation. Mr. Starr must be aware that he is persisting in his caricature of a fair and substantial legal investigation in diametric opposition to voter wishes. The public has shown by every device at their command, that they are tired of the inquiry, tired of the endless tricks, leaks, primping, posing and rigged publicity-scrounging, that has filled the nation's T-V screens for more than four years. It's not just beyond the bounds of public interest, it exceeds public forbearance and toleration. Enough is enough! The "independent counsel law" does not supersede all other restrictions of law, national custom, human decency and most particularly, voter patience. Ken Starr offers us a sick parody on the concepts of both law and logic. It is time he ceased his shameful exertions. Starr and the gaggle of misguided, egocentric, congressmen and senators who think they are the sole judges of what's good for America, have overdrawn their public credit accounts. Their high-handed political presumption has carried them far into an uncharted political wilderness that America - a nation of decency and reason - has never visited before. Now it's time to call a halt and see if we might be able to recapture our sense of national balance. Every indication of public attitudes points to a gaping chasm between what "the people" want, and what the Republican politicians want. In a dichotomy of this kind, the public's wishes must take precedence. It's time for our elected "public servants" to begin tailoring their actions to reflect the public will. Perhaps there was a time when there was no reliable method for quickly and constantly determining what the public attitude might have been. But that handicap no longer exists. The "Information Age" includes minute-by-minute information on what rank and file Americans are thinking. Public servants must pay attention! Elected officials who persist in ignoring public attitude, do so at great ballot-box peril. Now, more than ever before, because their electors can follow their every move. In this electronically enlightened age, a voter is privy to the same information his Senator enjoys. There is no monopoly on awareness. Anyone wanting to hold an elective office will keep this in mind. The "Information Revolution" brings hands-on, truly Democratic, government processes ever closer. To survive at the polls, the politicians are going to have to listen up when their constituents send them a message. This kind of direct connection between rank and file voters and their political representatives has never existed before. It will be interesting to see how many - if any - of the "old guard" politicians can make a successful behavioral transition to the new order of things. The pending impeachment of President William Jefferson Clinton, against the clear wishes and voluble instructions of the voters who twice elected him, is shaping up as the first test of our new political answerability. The results in the upcoming Year-2000 general election will offer pragmatic answers to the question about which of the senatorial and congressional candidates "got the message" - and which of them ignored "the message", at the cost of their jobs.
======
E N D ======== Lorenzo Dee Belveal, Author
Send
mail to [esteban@goodfelloweb.com]
with
questions or comments about this web site. |
||||||||||||
