• ISCRIVITI ALLA NEWSLETTER

Obama’s speech in 2012 election campaign seems to be clear (and positive). “Bin Laden is dead, and General Motors is alive.” These are the two goals Obama brought home. It should be well enough alone to win without caring about the Republican heavy artillery.

But this is not happening. Current elections are going to break every record of money raising. It’s a tragic situation for the American middle class, a broad category ranging from people who make 30 thousand dollars a year to those who earn 150 thousand dollars and beyond. For the sake of peace, class divisions have been cancelled. A cancellation that could not prevent us from recognizing, through a sociological and historical fog, the sedimentation of an “underclass” – that (in)famous 1% of society the Republican candidate Romney belongs to.

Fund raising is free and not always clear (rules can be easily ignored by making anonym donations and by creating phantom organizations) and took the spotlight from the beginning of this campaign. The Republicans are of course more active. “The inevitable candidate” is Mitt Romney, the guy with more money. At Christmas, on the eve of the first test in 2012 in Iowa, on January 3th, we thought that there would be no struggle. Twenty million dollars of negative advertising had been thrown against each other (Gingrich, more than others) to cover with mud Romney’s challengers.

But it was the opposite. In Iowa there was the surprise of Santorum. From then on surveys put all the Republican candidates in first place in turn. Some of them resisted until fundraising money lasted. And then our thought went to that Supreme Court decision that in 2010 allowed corporations (and unions) to participate in elections with their loads of money. That’s why Romney is correct when he says that corporations are people, despite it may sound paradoxical. Money is clean, washed out by a judgment that made history and is allowing the greatest load of negative advertising of all time.

No hypocrisy, no scandal for this flood of advertising. In a race that has become toxic, the question is: who will be the first to show a way-out? It won’t be Obama, who after the good start of 2008 has “surrendered” to the creation of his own Super Pac. A parallel campaign supporting his candidate without specifying his name, thus freely throwing mud at other candidates. It’s the perfect war, where anonym drones fight against each other, hitting more civilians than enemy bases. As a result, people became less interested in politics. Just look at how low has been the Republican primary turnout.

If the Republican kingmaker looks like the casino tycoon Sheldon Adelson, there is a problem. It is not a semantic problem: it’s not about whether corporations are people. It’s about whether people like Adelson can fund (11 million for Gingrich’s Super Pac) and maybe orient (“write” is too high a word) people with their messages (unconditionally pro Israel, in this case). Want an example? Gingrich’s campaign delivered a short movie about Romney’s life that even the most radical democratic agency could never conceive (“King of Bain: When Mitt Romney Came to Town”).

This campaign is like a roller coaster – every round has a new winner (16 countries to Romney, 10 to Santorum, 2 to Gingrich) – and is making the fortune of negative commercials assembler. All the ads look the same: thriller-movie soundtrack, mix of statements taken from different times edited to make the opponent candidate look like a moron. With few exceptions. One of them is the commercial in which an actor playing the role of Romney tries to hit a cardboard silhouette portraying Santorum. In this case we have a story. The rich Romney who would shoot his rival without hitting him. The story is good and catches at least one aspect of reality. Everybody is shooting, although some have more munitions because they have more money.

But no one (and Obama is no exception) has chosen the way of populism, showed by a Mr Smith marching on Washington alone. And if not now (Americans spend 15% of their time on the Internet on Facebook) when? When will social media be used to promote a candidate who wants to do without TV? Without getting lost in the ancient dilemma of the medium vs the message. It’s time for organic elections in the US. When Obama answered to questions (that were being filtered by Google) in a virtual town hall, it became clear that there is a huge new country, rich of potential, just waiting to be explored. The implosion of Herman Cain is the result of this ambiguity. He was destroyed from a question that is very popular among insiders, but he was out of the game and showed an embarrassing incompetence in managing the skeletons in his locker. In his case a lover was lethal – and yet Gingrich is still up, despite his life is way much less clear than Cain’s.

Everything is possible thanks to generous sponsors motivated with authentic crusading spirit. That’s something the true crusader Santorum understood. He is fighting a medieval battle with modern weapons. That’s what the president is doing with the campaign “Dinner with Obama”. Among 24 million Obama supporters, some of them will be chosen in a lottery and will go to dinner with the president. No matter who will win, what’s important is the creation of a new strategy that’s not based on fundraising. There are some ideas, even though they are 4 years old.

The deconstruction of the opponent candidate through money doesn’t kill democracy, as someone said. It depresses democracy and reduces politics to a grotesque size. It’s this grotesque aspect that comedian Stephen Colbert tried to highlight in his brilliant campaign where he made fun of Super Pacs. He arranged his own Super PAC and raised one million dollars, and then gave the collected amount to the candidate Herman Cain (South Carolina), who had already left the competition. Colbert made ads similar to the ones you could see around you. His attempt was to make us think of what was happening.

Another comedian, Bill Maher, anchorman of a talk show on HBO, has donated one million dollars to the Obama Super Pac in an effort to fix the imbalance with Romney and the Republicans. But it was a surrender to the fundraising system. A Washington Post-CBS poll (7-10 March) showed that 78% of independent voters and 69% of registered voters (Democrats and Republicans) want the abolition of Super PACs.

But why are we talking about Super PACs? Because in this doped election Super PACs rewrite the parties’ programs, more or less officially. Two dozen of people and corporations financed Super PACs. Harold Simmons, billionaire, is the king of chemistry and has been sued by environmentalists for loss of uranium and radiation; Foster Friess is an avowed opponent of unions; many hedge funds executives – Romney donors – support pre-crisis deregulation. What’s worse is that 20% of “secret money” deposited in the Super PACs which source is unknown and untraceable.

Never in the history of politics personal interest deviated from public interest as in this election. And these “strong thoughts” have resulted in an extraordinary flood of advertising campaigns. No one has understood candidates programs. Obama may lose for the economic crisis, for unemployment (only recently there has been a slight improve, but six million jobs are still missing since the beginning of the crisis) but an alternative economic program is still missing. If it exists, it’s covered by all the shouting (“Obama is a Muslim”, pro abortion a pro gay slogans, etc.).

This noise of fireworks, 30-second commercials, fired daily at a bulimic pace, ended up discovering an appliance that seemed destined to garage sales: TV. In 2008 it was announced that social media would surpass old media, but since the beginning of Republican primary elections everything has changed. Politics discovered an old friend and forgot the iPad. 30-second commercials are still alive and fighting. There aren’t great ideas around, but as CBS chief  Les Moonves said, “Super PACs may be bad for America but they’re very good for CBS”.

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