Gore Vidal: What the Election Is About

Gore Vidal, writing in the London Independent (Jan. 18, 2004):

It is often hard to explain to foreigners what an American presidential election is actually about. We cling to a two-party system in the same way that imperial Rome clung to the republican notion of two consuls as figurehead - to mark off, if nothing else, the years that they held office conjointly. They reigned ceremonially but were not makers of the political weather. Our two official parties have, at times, dedicated themselves to various issues, usually brought to their attention by a new president with a powerful popular mandate - hence the New Deal of Franklin Roosevelt, which gave, if nothing else, hope to a nation sunk in economic depression.

Later, as he himself folksily put it, "Dr New Deal has been replaced by Dr Win the War". Dr Win the War, whether he calls himself Republican or Democrat, is still providing - in theory - employment and all sorts of other good things for a people who did not emerge from the Depression until 1940, when Roosevelt began a military build-up. Sixty-four years later, like a maddened sorcerer's apprentice, he continues to churn out ever more expensive weapons built by an ever-shrinking workforce.

Since the US media are controlled by that corporate America which provides us with political candidates, an informed electorate is not possible. What the media do well is not analyse, or even inform, but personalise a series of evil enemies, who accumulate weapons of mass destruction (as we constantly do) to annihilate us in the night out of sheer meanness.

How, then, will a people grown accustomed to being lied to about serious matters behave during an actual presidential election, in which billions of dollars have been raised to give us a generally false view of the state of our - their? - union. Right off, half the electorate will not vote for president. Those who do vote sometimes exhibit unanticipated trends. In all the recent polls (easily, alas, rigged by the way the questions are posed) the conquest of Iraq is more and more regarded as an expensive mistake: the $ 87bn (pounds 48bn) that the President has now asked for to repair that country and which Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld joyously knocked down in order - it now appears - for his colleague, vice-president Dick Cheney's company Halliburton to rebuild. Americans in general seem to have got the point of the exercise.