US Mid-Term Elections

On November 2nd US citizens will go to the polls to choose a variety of state Judges, Representatives, Senator and Governors. This is hugely important because 2010 has been a census year. That means the first task facing these new politicians will be re-drawing the electoral boundaries in their state. This gives whichever party controls those state senates and governorships the opportunity to make sure wards where their support is the strongest are giving the most number of votes. This spectacularly named gerrymandering means that whoever wins the 2010 local elections effectively gets to choose the winner of the 2012 Presidential election without a single voter being asked.

While that's the campaign that Britain has been concentrating most of it's energies on the big battle that everyone will be watching is the national race for seats in the nation House of Representatives and the national Senate. Here candidates have spent endless hours and huge amounts of money fighting for a single two year term of office. So it's with some regret that I have to tell them that it's all been a huge waste of time.

You see back in the year 2000 the Governor of Florida made a huge mistake and elected George W Bush as President. Bush went on to make many, many mistakes of his own including two that had catastrophic consequences for the United States.

The first of these was to rise to Al Queda's bait and respond to the September 11th terrorists attacks by invading Afghanistan. That war is now entering it's tenth year costing trillions of dollars and hundreds of American lives. I wouldn't go so far as to say America is losing it but it certainly can't win while Hamid Karzai remains in power. As it's difficult to remove Karzai that means America is going to be chained to that war until 2015 at the earliest.

The second of Bush's huge mistakes was to fail to monitor the banking industry. This allowed a word wide credit bubble to form with people lending lots of money they didn't have to people who could never afford to repay it. When this bubble finally burst in the summer of 2008 the shock wave was enough to cause the capitalist system that has served the western world for thousands of years to virtually implode. The only way to prevent this was for governments around the world, America's included, to borrow more money to prop up the banks and prevent their economies from grinding to a complete halt. While these stimulus measures were enough to protect the average American for anywhere near the full horrors of the economic crisis it did leave the country with a long recession and a slightly larger national debt. As a result it will be 2012/2013 before anybody will be able to get the American economy back on track.

With these two problems still casting a major shadow over America until 2012 at the earliest American politic is in a sort of limbo meaning that it doesn't really matter whether the Republicans of the Democrats control Congress.

The big worry I have is that the Tea Party candidates will actually do quite well in this election because I actually quite like a lot of what they stand for. The problem is that they're not particularly well funded or have much experience of Washington politics. Plus we know as a fact that at least one of them isn't actually a witch. These are all the sort of things that are going to put them at a massive disadvantage in a world of spin doctors, lobbyists and special interest groups. So the worry is that while the Tea Party may go to Washington with all the best intentions they will fail miserably once they get there and in doing so discredit the values they represent. That would be a real shame for America because there are plenty in the world who would happily do away with Tea Party values like individual responsibility and respect for others because those values are simply not "progressive."