DAN ELLSBERG on the 2012 Presidential Elections
It is urgently important to prevent a Republican administration under
Romney/Ryan from taking office in January 2013.
The election is now just weeks away, and I want to urge those whose
values are generally in line with mine -- progressives, especially
activists -- to make this goal one of your priorities during this
period.
An activist colleague recently said to me: "I hear you're supporting Obama."
I was startled, and took offense. "Supporting Obama? Me?!"
"I lose no opportunity publicly," I told him angrily, to identify
Obama as a tool of Wall Street, a man who's decriminalized torture and
is still complicit in it, a drone assassin, someone who's launched an
unconstitutional war, supports kidnapping and indefinite detention
without trial, and has prosecuted more whistleblowers like myself than
all previous presidents put together. "Would you call that support?"
My friend said, "But on Democracy Now you urged people in swing states
to vote for him! How could you say that? I don't live in a swing
state, but I will not and could not vote for Obama under any
circumstances."
My answer was: a Romney/Ryan administration would be no better -- no
different -- on any of the serious offenses I just mentioned or
anything else, and it would be much worse, even catastrophically
worse, on a number of other important issues: attacking Iran, Supreme
Court appointments, the economy, women's reproductive rights, health
coverage, safety net, climate change, green energy, the environment.
I told him: "I don't 'support Obama.' I oppose the current Republican
Party. This is not a contest between Barack Obama and a progressive
candidate. The voters in a handful or a dozen close-fought swing
states are going to determine whether Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan are
going to wield great political power for four, maybe eight years, or
not."
As Noam Chomsky said [
http://www.zcommunications.
] recently, "The Republican organization today is extremely dangerous,
not just to this country, but to the world. It's worth expending some
effort to prevent their rise to power, without sowing illusions about
the Democratic alternatives."
Following that logic, he's said [
http://www.rawstory.com/rs/
] to an interviewer what my friend heard me say to Amy Goodman: "If I
were a person in a swing state, I'd vote against Romney/Ryan, which
means voting for Obama because there is no other choice."
The election is at this moment a toss-up. That means this is one of
the uncommon occasions when we progressives -- a small minority of the
electorate -- could actually have a significant influence on the
outcome of a national election, swinging it one way or the other.
The only way for progressives and Democrats to block Romney from
office, at this date, is to persuade enough people in swing states to
vote for Obama: not stay home, or vote for someone else. And that has
to include, in those states, progressives and disillusioned liberals
who are at this moment inclined not to vote at all or to vote for a
third-party candidate (because like me they've been not just
disappointed but disgusted and enraged by much of what Obama has done
in the last four years and will probably keep doing).
They have to be persuaded to vote, and to vote in a battleground state
for Obama not anyone else, despite the terrible flaws of the less-bad
candidate, the incumbent. That's not easy. As I see it, that's
precisely the "effort" Noam is referring to as worth expending right
now to prevent the Republicans' rise to power. And it will take
progressives -- some of you reading this, I hope -- to make that
effort of persuasion effectively.
It will take someone these disheartened progressives and liberals will
listen to. Someone manifestly without illusions about the Democrats,
someone who sees what they see when they look at the president these
days: but who can also see through candidates Romney or Ryan on the
split-screen, and keep their real, disastrous policies in focus.
It's true that the differences between the major parties are not
nearly as large as they and their candidates claim, let alone what we
would want. It's even fair to use Gore Vidal's metaphor that they form
two wings ("two right wings," as some have put it) of a single party,
the Property or Plutocracy Party, or as Justin Raimondo says, the War
Party.
Still, the political reality is that there are two distinguishable
wings, and one is reliably even worse than the other, currently much
worse overall. To be in denial or to act in neglect of that reality
serves only the possibly imminent, yet presently avoidable, victory of
the worse.
The traditional third-party mantra, "There's no significant difference
between the major parties" amounts to saying: "The Republicans are no
worse, overall." And that's absurd. It constitutes shameless
apologetics for the Republicans, however unintended. It's crazily
divorced from present reality.
And it's not at all harmless to be propagating that absurd falsehood.
It has the effect of encouraging progressives even in battleground
states to refrain from voting or to vote in a close election for
someone other than Obama, and more importantly, to influence others to
act likewise.That's an effect that serves no one but the Republicans,
and ultimately the 1 percent.
It's not merely understandable, it's entirely appropriate to be
enraged at Barack Obama. As I am. He has often acted outrageously, not
merely timidly or "disappointingly." If impeachment were politically
imaginable on constitutional grounds, he's earned it (like George W.
Bush, and many of his predecessors!) It is entirely human to want to
punish him, not to "reward" him with another term or a vote that might
be taken to express trust, hope or approval.
But rage is not generally conducive to clear thinking. And it often
gets worked out against innocent victims, as would be the case here
domestically, if refusals to vote for him resulted in Romney's taking
key battleground states that decide the outcome of this election.
To punish Obama in this particular way, on Election Day -- by
depriving him of votes in swing states and hence of office in favor of
Romney and Ryan -- would punish most of all the poor and marginal in
society, and workers and middle class as well: not only in the U.S.
but worldwide in terms of the economy (I believe the Republicans could
still convert this recession to a Great Depression), the environment
and climate change. It could well lead to war with Iran (which Obama
has been creditably resisting, against pressure from within his own
party). And it would spell, via Supreme Court appointments, the end of
Roe v. Wade and of the occasional five to four decisions in favor of
the Constitution and Bill of Rights.
The reelection of Barack Obama, in itself, is not going to bring
serious progressive change, end militarism and empire, or restore the
Constitution and the rule of law. That's for us and the rest of the
people to bring about after this election and in the rest of our lives
-- through organizing, building movements and agitating.
In the eight to twelve close-fought states -- especially Florida,
Ohio, and Virginia, but also Colorado, Iowa, Michigan, Nevada, New
Hampshire, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Virginia and Wisconsin -- for
any progressive to encourage fellow progressives and others in those
states to vote for a third-party candidate is, I would say, to be
complicit in facilitating the election of Romney and Ryan, with all
its consequences.
To think of that as urging people in swing states to "vote their
conscience" is, I believe, dangerously misleading advice. I would say
to a progressive that if your conscience tells you on Election Day to
vote for someone other than Obama in a battleground state, you need a
second opinion. Your conscience is giving you bad counsel.
I often quote a line by Thoreau that had great impact for me: "Cast
your whole vote: not a strip of paper merely, but your whole
influence." He was referring, in that essay, to civil disobedience, or
as he titled it himself, "Resistance to Civil Authority."
It still means that to me. But this is a year when for people who
think like me -- and who, unlike me, live in battleground states --
casting a strip of paper is also important. Using your whole influence
this month to get others to do that, to best effect, is even more
important.
That means for progressives in the next couple of weeks -- in addition
to the rallies, demonstrations, petitions, lobbying (largely against
policies or prospective policies of President Obama, including
austerity budgeting next month), movement-building and civil
disobedience that are needed all year round and every year -- using
one's voice and one's e-mails and op-eds and social media to encourage
citizens in swing states to vote against a Romney victory by voting
for the only real alternative, Barack Obama.
Daniel Ellsberg is a former State and Defense Department official who
has been arrested for acts of non-violent civil disobedience over
eighty times, initially for copying and releasing the top secret
Pentagon Papers, for which he faced 115 years in prison. Living in a
non-swing state, he does not intend to vote for President Obama.
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