[NYTr] Another Bush Buddy Bites the Dust: Howard Crushed in Oz Election

[All the News That Doesn't Fit]

Progreso Weekly - Nov 29, 2007
http://progreso-weekly.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=251&Itemid=1


Another Bush buddy bites the dust

John Howard crushed in Australian election

By Max J. Castro 

Aznar, Berlusconi, Blair: One by one, all the leaders who played a
major role in enabling Bush’s war in Iraq have suffered political
disaster. There was one exception to the trend, however, John Howard,
the Australian Primer Minister, a national leader who seemed fully
capable of surviving the Bush-Iraq curse. But that was a mirage that
dissipated last Saturday when Kevin Rudd and the Labor Party handed
Howard and his Conservatives a crushing defeat in the country’s
national elections.

Labor’s victory was so decisive and Howard’s defeat so disastrous that
the Prime Minister even lost the election in his own district, thus
becoming only the second sitting PM in Australian history that has been
booted out of Parliament by voters.

John Howard was not the only big loser in last weekend’s Australian
election, however; George W. Bush lost big as well.

Howard has been a vocal and material supporter of the Iraq war. He
staunchly resisted pressure to pull out the 550 Australian combat
troops serving in the war. In contrast, Rudd has promised a phased
withdrawal, joining a string of countries that have already pulled out
their troops, such as Spain and Italy, or that are planning to do so in
the near future, including Poland. Thus the “coalition of the willing,”
mainly a symbolic cover for U.S. troops from day one, now shrinks to
virtual oblivion.

That is bad enough for Bush, yet the Iraq war was not the only issue on
which John Howard continued to stand shoulder to shoulder with the
increasingly isolated U.S. president against most of the world. The
Australian PM also joined Bush in a stubborn refusal to sign the Kyoto
Protocol to curb global warming. Now Bush is really alone: Rudd has
promised to sign the Kyoto Protocol upon taking office, leaving the
United States as the only developed country yet to join the agreement.

And there is more. In handing Howard a stinging defeat, Australian
voters were not only sending a message about the importance of climate
change and the folly of the Iraq war. They were also turning their
backs on a political ideology and style.

The Australian press has described John Howard as a divisive leader and
the country’s most ideological Prime Minister. And, Howard’s ideology,
like George Bush’s, has been decidedly right-wing. According to Paul
Keating writing in the Sydney Morning Herald, “when Howard decided to
go after workers with his Work Choices legislation, he did so not out
of any economic necessity, as the economic record for wages and
inflation attests. He did it simply to break the back of the unions.
His motivations were ideological and spiteful…”

The same type of ideological motivation and spite rather than economic
necessity was behind Bush’s failed attempt to undermine and privatize
Social Security which had to be destroyed not because it is failing or
doomed to bankruptcy. The program is sound now and will remain sound
far into the future with only relatively minor adjustments. Social
Security had to be destroyed for sheer ideological reasons, namely that
it is an extremely successful and popular government program the
existence of which continually belies the Republican myth that the
state is incapable of doing anything well. To add insult to injury, the
fact that Social Security is publicly-administered at a low cost means
that Republican supporters, private profiteers on Wall Street and
beyond, are denied the colossal fees that would come from managing a
colossal pool of money.

The rout of Howard and the Conservatives in Australia may hold another
kind of message for the Republican Party in the United States,
especially for GOP presidential candidates trying to score political
points by coded appeals to racism framed in the language of opposition
to “illegal immigrants.” Shortly before the election, possibly out of
desperation, Howard made a coded racist appeal to Australian voters. As
Keating describes it:

“In The Sun-Herald on November 18, John Howard nominated the putting
asunder of political correctness and the celebration of our
Anglo-Celtic past as the pinnacle of his social, indeed national,
achievement. He was nominating as a virtue political incorrectness of a
kind that gave some the right to speak and behave towards others in
terms disparaging of their colour, religion, class or social standing.
In a country of immigrants, such a view emanating from the Prime
Minister is social poison.”

Devoid of any positive political message, saddled with an unpopular war
and President, Republicans now running for the White House are plying
voters with this very poison. It is a dastardly tack; it may also be a
losing one, and not only in Australia. The same tactic failed in
California more than a decade ago. There, Republicans demonized
undocumented immigrants in the 1990s; they are still suffering for it
politically. Scapegoating immigrants for political profit also failed
more recently and in a much more conservative state than California.
Republican candidates in Virginia played the anti-illegal immigrant
card relentlessly in last month’s elections for state and local
offices. The result was that the GOP lost control of one chamber of the
legislature and just managed to avert the same fate in the other. 

John Howard’s political demise, which represents a defeat for a selfish
and aggressive foreign policy unconcerned with international law or
global environmental stewardship and for a mean-spirited domestic
policy that systematically favors the most powerful and privileged,
raises the hope that it might be a harbinger of things to come in the
United States.