In the middle of a storm, the US is adrift

HURRICANE Isaac had an elemental impact on the Republican National Convention last week. The ‘Grand Old Party’ (GOP) was gathered in Tampa, Florida, to select Mitt Romney as presidential candidate.

Holding the convention in Florida at the height of the hurricane season wasn’t bright, but, as always in American politics, there was method to the madness.

Florida is a swing state, one of a handful of states crucial in determining the final vote. So it requires some lovin’ from the candidates. Bringing the convention carnival to Florida was an act of wooing. In this game of harvesting votes, the bigger picture can be lost. So it turned out. Isaac made landfall in nearby Louisiana, with lashing winds and torrential rain battering the coastline as surely as circumstances are hammering away at a traditional American way of life. The convention was unaffected, but caution and anxiety displaced the celebratory mood of earlier in the week.

Anxiety is a good place to start when considering America and its politics today. If optimism defined the nation, and made it great, in the 20th century, then anxiety permeates its mood as the glories begin to fade.

The old certainties are gone. The American dream was never a universal franchise, but if you were white, of able body and mind and willing to work hard, the promise of progress was held out. If you didn’t make it up the socio-economic ladder, at least you were given the opportunity to hold the ladder for your offspring.

A different America was known on the margins, by people of colour, or not gifted with the body or mind to forge ahead, but there was enough to go around for most people, and for the huddled masses who came in search of something better. In that, America differed from most other countries.

Times change.

The American middle class — who worked hard, educated their children, and had comfort in retirement — is being squeezed. Unemployment is over 8%, a level regarded as scandalous stateside. Jobs are migrating east. The old stalwarts, like the automobile industry, are heading for the knacker’s yard. Despite much talk about adaptation, broad swathes of middle America are not in any position to exploit the high-tech jobs that are the future. Divisions between the rich and the rest are widening.

A new book, Days of Destruction, Days of Revolt, which charts the decline of the American middle class, illustrates the point.

In 1980, the average chief executive of an American company was paid 42 times the average factory worker. Today, that differential has widened to 325 times. Taxes for the rich were 51% in 1955. Today, the rich are on average taxed 17%. The rate of change in these differentials was much faster through George W Bush’s presidency than in the previous decades.

Mitt Romney, the man who would be president, is a perfect example of where America has been going. The economist Paul Krugman has compared Mitt with his father, George Romney, who made an unsuccessful bid for the presidency in 1968. Like his son, George served time as a governor, in Michigan, to Mitt’s Massachusetts. Like Mitt, George was very wealthy. Unlike Mitt, George earned his money making things. He ran a company, American motors, which manufactured automobiles, and created hundreds, if not thousands, of domestic jobs.

Mitt, by contrast, made his money in financial engineering, buying up companies and restructuring them through his vehicle, Bain Capital. He didn’t create many jobs and often workers were left worse off in the companies he bought. Others lost their jobs when the companies were bankrupted in pursuit of further financial engineering.

In 1968, George had no problem telling the electorate about his finances. He published 12 years of tax returns, in which he made, on average, the equivalent of $5m in today’s money. He paid an average of 38% in tax.

Mitt, by contrast, is refusing to publish anything more than one year’s returns, which leaves him open to the charge that he can shuffle his accounts to put a brighter picture on a single year. He makes tens of millions a year from his investments.

Mitt has had Swiss bank accounts, and millions invested in the Cayman Islands, famed as a tax haven. Last month, he told an interviewer that he never paid less than 13% in tax. Isn’t that something? The multi-millionaire who would be president is telling the little people that he pays at least 13% on his massive earnings.

Back in the 1960s, when the US was still an economic beacon, the writer John Updike said: “God had withdrawn his blessing from America.” He was speaking in the wake of the tragedies of the Kennedys, Martin Luther King and Vietnam. But the same notion might be applied to America’s broader health.

The country has lost its way over the last few decades. Economically, it has not met the challenges of a changing world. Bush’s horrendously expensive wars, and the growing refusal of the rich to pay their share of tax, have distracted the nation from meeting the challenges presented beyond its shores.

The convention in Florida last week was another illustration of where America is at. The party has drifted seriously to the right over the last decade, best exemplified in the growing power of the Tea Party, which harks back to the past, to an America that was predominantly white, and retained what are regarded as family values.

The Tea Party is big on the three ‘Gs’: guns, God and gays. They are very much in favour of the first two, but largely regard the third as an abomination.

Romney doesn’t share the so-called cultural values espoused by the Tea Party and their fellow travellers, so they consider him an appeaser, but he’s the only hope they have of ridding the country of Barack Obama, who is regarded as the incarnation of Satan.

For his part, Romney represents the other strain within the party, the one which believes the main answer to the country’s ills is to cut taxes for the rich. On this, he has purchase on one half of the soul of the party. Right now, he has a good chance of becoming president.

If you enjoy a keen sense of the ridiculous, you gotta love American politics.

* Fogra: I have been hoist on my own petard. As keen-eyed readers noticed last week, the column in this slot criticised Enda Kenny for claiming in his Beal Na mBlath speech that Michael Collins had brought Lenin to Ireland. I noted elsewhere that Fine Gael had raised Collins to the “top of their petard”.

From such a high moral vantage, I shot myself in the foot. Letter writers have gleefully informed me that a ‘petard’ is not a standard or flagpole, as I had assumed, but a little French bomb that was once used to blow open a door. I deserve every minute of the time I’ve spent in the dunce’s corner since that bombshell was dropped on me.