BY EVAN GREER

In print | February 12, 2004

Everywhere I go, I hear people saying, “Yeah, I know Wesley Clark is a war criminal, but Kucinich can’t win, and, well, you know, anyone but Bush, right?” In fact, nearly everyone I’ve talked to on this campus seems to feel that they cannot vote for the candidate that they feel best supports their interests. This forces me to question what is becoming an increasingly loose definition of “democracy.”

Let’s get a few things straight about our would-be presidents. I’ll skip Bush, since, if you’re reading my column, chances are you’re not voting for him. Let’s just examine a few of the Democratic frontrunners.

Let’s start with John Kerry, senator of my home state, Massachusetts. This poster child of democracy voted for the war in Iraq even though Massachusetts’ opinion polls showed overwhelming opposition to a preemptive invasion. If he can’t even represent his constituents on a state level, how can we expect him to represent us all as our president? He supports Star Wars missile defense, a highly controversial, costly and dangerous weapons project. His positions on the USA PATRIOT Act and the war in Iraq are vague at best. Furthermore, he is one of the only Democrats who actually plans to increase the Pentagon budget. (Note that it is already at more than $400 billion a year, over $1 billion a day.) My question on John Kerry is this: How is he going to increase the Pentagon budget and also improve education and health care as much as he claims he is going to? The answer: He’s not. To top it all off, in last week’s Boston Metro, Kerry said that his view on gay marriage is “no different than Dick Cheney’s.”

Moving on to “liberal” sweetheart, former Gov. Howard Dean. Dean also does not plan to cut the $400 billion Pentagon budget. He may have spoken against the Iraq war, but his policies on Israel-Palestine and Colombia show that he is certainly no Gandhi. He is unclear about whether he’d support a pre-emptive U.S. strike in the future, and he flip-flops on so many issues that even his own supporters can’t seem to keep up.

Finally, we have Gen. Wesley Clark. Amnesty International declared him a war criminal when he tried to cover up his orders for troops to bomb civilian targets in Serbia. In an interview on Democracy Now! radio, all Clark had to say was, “I was doing my duty, and I have been looked at by the law, so — I mean, I respect Amnesty International. I think they’re a good organization, but …” When further questioned, he said he had to go speak to some other voters. He has yet to take a strong stand on, well, anything, other than that he’s going to “change things.”

The only nice thing I ever hear people say about Clark is that he’s so “electable.” How many more times will we choose between the lesser of two evils and still find out we got the devil? Just calling someone a “Democrat” doesn’t mean anything. If their policies are not going to benefit the working people of this country, and their opinions are unclear, why should we give them our support simply based on their party affiliation? Sometimes I feel that if a clone of George Bush ran as a Democrat, half the people here would support him because he’s so “electable.”

Why should we be forced to choose among three liars and a war criminal? I’m not sure what I’m going to do in the upcoming election, but I hope that people will realize that even if we had a perfect president most of the problems in our country would not be solved. Poverty, war, racism and oppression existed before Bush came to power, and they will survive long after him, regardless of which wealthy white man takes the office next.

Voting simply is not enough for those who seek true democracy. Elections may be an important right, but they can also be a powerful smokescreen that distracts us from other effective ways to make change. Democracy is not a multiple-choice question. It is something we must create and fight for with every second of our lives.__

Evan Greer is a first-year. You can reach him at egreer1@swarthmore.edu.

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