It’s become increasingly obvious recently that the journey towards the gilded throne of the American Presidency involves the shredding of whatever principles a candidate might possess. True to form, Barack Obama has been busily putting any vestigial conscience through the mangle of the US party political machine, emerging the monster that the job requires. Throughout his inexorable rise, he has proved a ready advocate of military interventionism (or “terrorism”, the less euphemistic term employed when its practitioners are people we don’t like), declaring in thinly-veiled tones his potential willingness to attack Iran. He has displayed an extraordinarily brazen contempt for democracy, claiming to have “opposed holding [Palestinian] elections in 2006 with Hamas on the ballot” - the kind of “free” electoral choice of which a Robert Mugabe or a Saddam Hussein would surely be proud. In accordance with a long tradition in US politics, Obama is ignoring the US public’s preference for a state-funded healthcare system. And, of course, he has continued to back Israel to the hilt. Obama’s declaration to the American-Israeli Public Affairs Committee that “Jerusalem will remain the capital of Israel and it must remain undivided” signals his apparent readiness to impose a settlement on the Palestinians in violation of international law and the consensual position of the international community.

As Ali Abunimah points out, it was not always thus. Obama’s current political positioning has required a continual process of alignment with the “hardline consensus underpinning US policy”. Nowhere is this better symbolised, perhaps, than in one statement he was forced to revise under strong pressure from the Israel lobby: “nobody has suffered more than the Palestinian people”, quickly changed to “Nobody has suffered more than the Palestinian people from the failure of the Palestinian leadership to recognise Israel”. Our victims, as ever, have no-one to blame but themselves.

As Robert McChesney suggests, this apparent flexibility is worryingly characteristic of self-professedly “centrist” candidates. As he puts it in a recent interview:

“But, you know, the problem—the concern with Obama—I wouldn’t say “problem”—is he’s a centrist Democrat, self-styled. And centrist Democrats, that gets translated into meaning you’re comfortable sort of selling out your voting base for the moneyed interests that bankroll the party. And the test is going to be whether the strong grassroots support for his campaign and the good advisers around him can overwhelm that strong pressure that Democrats traditionally have, if they’re in power, to cave in to commercial interest.”

Interestingly, though, the reverse process also seems to apply - as Democratic Presidential candidates journey back out from the political centre, they are able to re-acquire at least some of the progressive principles they formerly discarded on their inward trajectory, along with some ability to state that two and two equals four. Al Gore has received a massacring at the hands of the American right for attempting to state that a phenomenon founded on unimpeachable empirical evidence is actually happening, and matters; while President Jimmy Carter’s use of the “a” word in characterising the situation in Israel-Palestine (so shocking a comparison that it has also been made by Archbishop Desmond Tutu, the mainstream Israeli press and mainstream Israeli human rights monitors), along with his scandalous suggestion that peacemaking might require one side’s engaging in talks with another, have seen him torn to pieces from all sides.

Clearly, the support of these high-profile former power-holders has been a much-needed boost for the growing movement seeking to avert environmental catastrophe, and for those urging the recognition of Palestinians’ basic rights. But we forget at our peril their dire record while in office. As a Vice-President in Clinton‘s government, Al Gore not only helped preside over a policy of sanctions on Iraq condemned as “genocidal” by two successive UN humanitarian co-ordinators, he also oversaw the trashing of international talks on a proposed climate treaty. Carter, a consistent supporter of brutal and bloody regimes in Nicaragua, El Salvador and Guatemala, and of the Shah of Iran, whose history of torture was condemned as “beyond belief”, by Amnesty International (“[n]o country in the world”, the group stated, “has a worse record in human rights”), stepped up and maintained military assistance to the Indonesian dictatorship in the midst of its protracted genocidal campaign against the population of occupied East Timor. And he did all this and more, while proclaiming that “[h]uman rights is the soul of our foreign policy”. Support for genocide is a Democratic Party tradition - one to which prospective power-holders must accommodate themselves.

It would be a profound mistake, however, to view such a process of accomodation as moving candidates closer to the American public, who have in fact shown consistent progressive leanings on a range of issues, and still do (have a look, for instance, at the changes proposed by members of the public to Bush’s 2005 budget). It is the profoundly distorting influence of dominant commercial interests on mainstream electoral politics, and on the US mass media, that derives from a relatively progressive public an elite political landscape from which the left is all but entirely excised.

For many Americans, though, there seems to be a seems to be a good deal of awareness of the major deficiencies at the heart of their political system. The problem facing Americans in coming years, then, extends far beyond simply replacing George W. Bush: it is to replace the system that created him with a real, functioning democracy.

Also ... Have I judged Al Gore’s record unfairly? Not according to one man who ought to know, namely Al Gore. As Mark Hertsgaard writes on Comment Is Free:

“I spent two hours one-on-one with Gore just before An Inconvenient Truth was released. Much of the interview focused on an irony that seems to have escaped many of those who have urged him to run for president: the last time he was in power, he failed to deliver much progress against global warming. During its eight years in office, the Clinton-Gore administration did not pass a single major law against climate change. It did sign the Kyoto Protocol, but only after watering it down with crippling loopholes, and then it chose not to seek Senate ratification of the treaty.

“In our interview, Gore acknowledged these failings. But he argued that the blame lay not with him or Clinton, who, he said, “was much more responsive than not”. Rather, Gore said, “the resistance was tremendous” from the status quo. The two richest, most powerful industries in American history, oil and autos, were fiercely opposed to cutting emissions, as were coal and electricity companies. Kyoto was “blocked by pressure from the polluters,” Gore told me, adding that Exxon-Mobil and other big companies “purposely confused people” with tens of millions of dollars of advertising and lobbying that misrepresented and disparaged the science behind global warming. This disinformation campaign encouraged “massive denial in the country as a whole” and “conditioned the battlefield” in Washington so that Congress ended up blocking reform. ...

“The lesson Gore seems to have drawn from his defeats is that being president is not enough to create real change, especially if powerful interests are against you. The only way to defeat those interests is to “re-condition the battlefield”, as Gore put it - to build such a pervasive wave of public pressure that no matter which politicians get elected, they will feel compelled to take action, even if it means disappointing Exxon-Mobil and friends. ...

“Gore’s years in the Clinton White House appear to have taught him a vital lesson about modern democracy, a lesson that is omitted from most textbooks and news coverage: being president, like being right, is not enough. The only way to beat organised money is with organised people, lots of them.”