Who would vote for a lame duck president?

Who would vote for a lame duck president?
Whichever way you look at it, the next President of the United States will be, in political terms, a “lame duck.”

That is, someone unable to do what they say they want to do, though the term also specifically refers to the action of a president about to leave office.

The sense I am using is the weakness that comes from the many issues that are actually beyond their control – such as world peace, the euro crisis or anything to do with the Middle East, Africa, China or Russia – and also because they won’t have control of either the Congress or the Senate.

So why are so many New Zealanders disdainful of Mitt Romney and saying the world will be much worse unless President Obama is re-elected?

The chances are that a Republican president with the backing of the Congress may be better for New Zealand, if only because the free trade agenda won’t be sidelined as much as it has under President Obama.

American commentator Anne Applebaum, who has worked for UK media publications and is married to Poland’s foreign minister, explains the irrelevance of the US election in terms of media expectations that modern leaders are now responsible for everything that happens.

It is natural, therefore, that superstorm Sandy’s impact on New York and other parts of the US east coast is now measured in its likely support for President Obama’s re-election chances.

But perhaps the media’s faith that leaders will solve all problems will not be borne out by people’s actual perceptions.

As Applebaum reminds us,

Whoever wins on November 6 is likely to face a split Congress, which means he will not have a free hand with the budget, health care or other major programmes. Around the world, either man would face the same unenviable policy choices in Afghanistan, Syria and Iran.

Either will find it difficult to deal with the prickly leaders of China and Russia. Neither will have unquestioned authority to make peace in the Middle East or unchallenged control over the UN. Security Council.

In other words, after next Wednesday, business as usual.

Is there a real agenda?
There are many other schools of thought about President Obama’s second term. Will he reveal his real agenda, which will mainly target “fracking” (oil and gas), polluting industries (cement, etc) and heavy users of greenhouses gases?

Or will he widen restrictions on employment laws and strengthen the entitlements that Mitt Romney now says are available to 47% of Amerricans.

Certainly, Americans are now more dependent on the government for their income than any time since 1929.

President Obama’s first terms is notable for aq number of achievements: the prevention of post-GFC collapse, rescued the auto industry, tougher regulation of Wall Street and wider government support for healthcare.

But he remains faced with the biggest debt in US history and the prospects of major cutbacks in government spending that will hurt his supporters most.

More fundamentally, both candidates still represent a nation equally divided between those who believe the role government is an end in itself – resolving issues such as inequality and opportunities –  and those who believe  the opposite.

New Zealand-born political scientist Kenneth Minogue cites this split as fundamental in a review  of two new books on the neo-liberal ideas that challenged the postwar vogue of state regulation and rose to their peak in early 1990s.

Minogue says the progenitors of neoliberalism, such as Friedrich von Hayek, couldn’t quite grasp why ideals of social justice could triumph in free societies, “that a truth so evident as the virtues opf the free market should have had such little permanent effect on public opinion.

"There is no doubt that freedom on the one hand and entirely just outcomes on the other are (however judged) impossible to combine. Yet believing that we have such immense power over nature, we yearn to be able to create a society that guarantees the happiness and contentment that would result from the universal satisfaction of human needs."

Big Norm revisted
One New Zealander who didn’t believe in the free market but championed social justice was Norman Kirk, whose legacy was mainly in now taken-for-granted issues such as recognition of communist China, anti-nuclear tasting, sporting ties with apartheid South Africa, the Treaty of Waitangi Act and ACC.

His legacy is being marked at a seminar in Auckland this weekend organised by the NZ Fabian Society, itself a movement  that goes back to the times of George Bernard Shaw, H G Wells, and Sydney and Beatrice Webb.

As the publicity states,

"Many regard the Kirk government as the most important and visionary for people within memory. The larger-than-life politician not only had such a significant impact on our country but on the way the world sees New Zealand - he helped drive that clean, green image and the reputation of equal opportunity."

But the seminar is devoid of any economic perspective – one that brought a rapid end to the Kirk government and exposed the Labour movement’s fundamental weakness then and now.

Not in our backyard
It is a word of faith among many that Hollywood is a stronghold of Judaism and that movies from there are just another way that Israel projects its influence in the world.

Certainly, the movie du jour, Argo, has a patently Jewish-looking production company behind the ruse that helped six American diplomats escape the clutches of the Revolutionary Guards in 1980.

But there’s another side to this story. Oil-rich Islamic states in the Gulf are also becoming big backers of Hollywood.

National Interest contributor Susan Schmidt says an Abu Dhabi company, Image Nation, is helping to fund such hits as The Help and Contagion with a billion-dollar funding.

It is also venturing into more politically contentious themes as Deepwater Horizon’s Final Hour, which reconstructs the BP oil spill in the Mexican Gulf, and Promised Land, a Matt Damon film about the impact of fracking on an Iowa town.

These films don’t make any secret of their intention to influence public opinion and are also savvy in their use of social media to achieve this aim.

Schmidt, who works for a think tank, the Foundation for Defence of Democracies, says funding of this nature is not subject to the same disclosure as funding of organisations such as her own.

But she has a point when she notes that the Gulf countries, including Saudi Arabia, do not allow any media in their own countries to openly attack the oil industry.