Irish Examiner view: Campaign mud starts to fly in the US

First primary in New Hampshire will take place next Tuesday

Sat, 20 Jan, 2024 - 02:00

If you are the type of person who keeps a diary, then you might know what you were doing on this day 15 years ago.

It was a Tuesday. At home, the headlines were dominated by the nationalisation of the Anglo Irish Bank. Constitutional experts were reflecting on the 90th anniversary of the first meeting of Dáil Éireann. The GAA was in the middle of an acrimonious strike by Cork hurlers.

But the eyes of the world were on Washington for the inauguration of Barack Obama, the first African-American president, who campaigned on the slogan “Change we can believe in”, which amplified into the chant “Yes we can”.

The images of that day — Aretha Franklin singing ‘My Country, ’Tis of Thee’; Obama’s evangelical references to the Gettysburg Address; the crowd of more than 1m people — were captured in a 16-page broadsheet supplement by the Irish Examiner.

Although that was produced in full colour, the mind’s eye recollection of that event carries a sepia tinge of optimism and nostalgia for a world that seems inexorably different. If not a land of lost content, then, almost certainly, one where we cannot come again.

Those thoughts presented themselves as we digested the opening shots in what could become a procession to the nomination for the Republican candidature for the White House.

On the coldest day in the history of US caucuses, the former president, Donald Trump, won an overwhelming 30-point victory in Iowa, with one-time hopeful Ron DeSantis scrambling into second place just ahead of Nikki Haley.

Vivek Ramaswamy, the chemist-lawyer-billionaire who placed much of his emphasis on social media on the campaign trail, dropped out.

This means we will now be spared from some of his more egregious claims: that the climate change agenda is “a hoax”, that “Big Tech” stole the 2020 election, and that the Democrats support “the Great Replacement Theory” to displace the white American population. Spared for now, that is. Ramaswamy, 38, has thrown his weight behind Trump. Watch this space.

A caucus is not an election. It’s a political meeting after which votes are cast. Peculiarly, it allows voters to switch party affiliations on the day.

But it has created the mood music for the first primary in New Hampshire which will take place next Tuesday and where polls place Trump 16 points ahead of Haley, with DeSantis trailing in a very distant third. Then comes a potentially defining vote in South Carolina on February 24.

We won’t have to wait for the first allegations of vote rigging. They’ve already been made by Maga supporters angry because Donald Trump lost one single county, to Nikki Haley, in Iowa.

Having crossed the start line for insinuations about electoral integrity, we can expect to hear much more.

Not quite what the poet Elisabeth Alexander had in mind when she wrote ‘Praise Song For The Day’, her tribute on the hopeful, bright, and breezy afternoon that Barack Obama entered the Oval Office. But words that are likely to stay with us for the whole of this significant year are: “All about us is noise. All about us is noise and bramble, thorn and din.”

Finding the cryptic answer

Once in a while, the side of the angels can come out on top in the technological struggle against global criminals.

Cryptocurrency has many advocates and critics. Sceptics point to its malign influence in drug dealing, money laundering, terrorism, and human trafficking. Citizens and taxpayers wonder how all this can take place with such impunity, authorities robbed of their chief weapon in uncovering malpractice: Following the money.

Now, a reporter has explained how a fatal flaw in the bitcoin blockchain — the distributed ledger linking data transactions with a cryptographic symbol and with apparently unbreakable anonymity — was utilised by agents of the law.

It resulted in a massive, dark-web narcotics market takedown, the arrest of hundreds of paedophiles around the world, and the three biggest enforcement monetary seizures in US Justice Department history.

In Tracers in the Dark, Andy Greenberg, the cybersecurity reporter for Wired magazine, recounts how a small team of analysts, programmers, accountants, investigators, and prosecutors brought to book different types of organised crime groups and individuals, who thought they were beyond the reach of regulators, banks, police, and governments.

According to the World Economic Forum, cybercrime has grown to be the third-largest economy after the US and China. Some estimates say that it will cost the world €11 trillion by the end of next year. It’s good that the devil doesn’t have a monopoly on all the best tunes.

The migration debate is now going mainstream

The pictures of Garda lines guarding the Racket Hall hotel in Tipperary, a potential relocation site for asylum-seeking families, have circulated around the world.

For the third time in two months, the idea that parts of Ireland have had their fill of the well-meaning, but creaking, conventions for people seeking legal international protection is gaining global traction.

Those views are reinforced by public protests and by decisions such as Mayo County Council’s to cease co-operating with central Government until “a clear strategy for the housing of refugees” is put in place.

Taoiseach Leo Varadkar is correct that “nobody in a democracy has the right to veto ... who moves into their area”. But he may find himself on shakier ground when he asserts that actions by locals are “anti-democratic” and “against the spirit and the values of our nation”. Politicians of all hues will take note of new research across nine EU member states, representing 75% of the bloc’s population, plus Britain and Switzerland.

‘A Crisis of One’s Own: The Politics of Trauma in Europe’s Election Year’ concludes that voting intentions will be influenced by the impact of five great disruptions: The climate emergency, migration, global economic turmoil, the war in Ukraine, and the pandemic. Voters will give priority to what affects them most.

The survey, of 15,081 adults, says that respondents displayed a “strong sense of disappointment resulting from government inadequacies in crisis management — and a fear that the crises might return”.

While climate change was viewed as the major threat, there were variances between voters, with younger people more likely to worry about global warming, and older citizens, who vote more regularly, more anxious about the impact of migration on their communities.

These two issues are dominating media and political debate in the run-up to elections, the report states, adding: “While climate activists fear the obliteration of human and other life, anti-migration activists fear the disappearance of their nations and their cultural identity.”

The 2024 European parliament elections will be “about projections rather than projects”, it adds.

If that is the case, then assurances that areas “under the most pressure” will receive additional resources may not provide the soothing balm that Mr Varadkar envisaged when he made that promise.

The number of asylum seekers without State accommodation has passed 600, our worst performance in providing shelter to applicants since the introduction of direct provision 24 years ago.

There is no sign of the anticipated, and revised, white paper from Integration Minister Roderic O’Gorman, setting out a longer-term strategy on how new arrivals can be adequately housed. The clock is ticking. Until now, it has been common to discount anxieties as a consequence of anti-immigrant, right-wing, or racist thinking, the preoccupations of a small minority. Dog-whistle politics.

But in unparalleled global circumstances, the debate is moving mainstream. Governments need to get ahead of the curve.