The Romance of Elections

Elections here. Elections there.

On August 10 Bolivians will return to the polls once again. Some will go to fight for Evo and others to get rid of him. Some will go just because the law obligates them to. In the U.S., voters have been gripped by election season for more than a year and the final vote is still four months away.

Here and there the romance of elections is in the air. "If we just win the vote everything will change." That's the romance, be it in Spanish or English. I am a proponent of voting. Since I turned 18 I've done it with every legal opportunity offered. Voting matters because who gets elected matters. Anyone who says otherwise is fooling themselves. Need an example? I have no doubt that if Al Gore had been elected in 2000 that the U.S. would not have invaded Iraq. It is not a marginal difference.

But anyone, in the U.S., Bolivia, or anywhere else, who thinks that winning elections is all it takes to change things is fooling themselves as well. Winning the vote is just the start. In Bolivia and the U.S. right now, that is a lesson worth taking seriously.

Bolivia

Let us take Bolivia.

Evo's election in 2005 was full of romance, as much abroad as here. The first indigenous President of the hemisphere's most indigenous nation. The ritual at Tiwanaku. Whipalas in the air. La Paz full of heads of state and dignitaries. "Imagine, a campesino is going to be President!" a taxi driver said to me with such pride.

Lesson one about winning elections: what winning buys you is the official authority of the office, which is a good deal of power to be sure. But in a pluralistic, democratic society where others feel differently, those leaders are still in a power-sharing arrangement with those who oppose them – like it or not.

Bolivia's left, when it was out of power, made that point quite clearly to those in power, by making the nation ungovernable. Did Evo and MAS really expect their natural adversaries to roll over and do different? Did Evo and MAS have a strategy in hand to either deal with or isolate those adversaries? Not one that is easy to spot.

Like it or not, the opposition in Bolivia has brought the 'Evo revolution' if you wish to call it that, to a practical standstill.

There is a certain delusional nostalgia in Bolivia's return to the polls next month. Even if Evo holds on to the 54% he won that heady December two and a half years ago, does that mean that suddenly his opponents will step aside and let him carry on with, for example, the new Constitution? Don't bet your morning Saltena on it. And what if MAS succeeds in ousting some its adversaries among the state Governors, like Manfred Reyes Villa? Will that suddenly neuter his opponents? No, quite the opposite. It will embolden the opposition in Cochabamba into the streets and the violence certain to follows will be a disaster for Bolivia and will only make the Morales government weaker, not stronger.

Making change in Bolivia is far more complicated than winning elections.

The U.S.A.

Now lets look north. There is so much to be inspired about in this year's U.S. Presidential Election. A black man promising change may well be the next occupant of the Oval Office. Thousands of young people of all colors have taken to electoral politics as a vehicle for change. Millions of people making small donations have done more to change the face of campaign financing than anything political reformers have achieved in twenty years (I say this as a former advocate with Common Cause).

But again the cardinal rule of politics. Winning the vote is a start but it is just the start. Turning victory at the polls into real change is complicated and fails as often as it succeeds.

Here is an inside secret about U.S. politics, one I learned by working for and around politicians for five years and almost becoming one myself. Politicians – be they in U.S. or Bolivian – are mathematicians. They are constantly doing political math equations in their head.

"If I do this, who will I make happy and who will I piss off? How much importance do I assign to the ones who are made angry? How much will they hurt me?"

They do this, left and right, in the name of maintaining the authority that they have fought so hard to secure.

Making change through the political system is about affecting the math. It is about affecting the equations in politicians' heads. Here are two examples:

President Bush was able to invade Iraq not just because he had the authority as President to do so, but because his administration willfully manipulated the facts to turn the public's post 9/11 fears into a political math in which even supposedly "liberal Democrats" felt politically compelled to vote for war.

President Clinton (and Hillary) thought that his 1992 win at the polls gave them the authority to win national health care reform, but they failed miserably at creating the political math for reform, and hence lost badly.

What will this mean for 'progressives' if Senator Obama wins? The post-primaries vigil over "Is he moving right?" has already begun. Last week the nominee-to-be voted to give immunity to communications companies that helped President Bush's illegal wiretapping adventures.

Be ready. Whatever disappointment we hear from idealistic Obama supporters now will be far louder if he wins and the real compromises begin. You want to make a difference? Focus not only on the election (and that matters a lot) but the math afterwards as well.

The speed with which Obama pulls the U.S. out or Iraq (or that President McCain does not) will depend on whether citizens in the U.S. continue their organizing work to make the case. So it will be as well on energy policy, health care reform and the other front burner issues for whoever is elected.

And here is where politics are much the same be they in Bolivia or the U.S. August 10 in one place, November 4 in the other. Voters in both places will go the polls and register their sentiments about who should and who should not have authority in their country.

Each vote will set the stage, but the play that comes afterwards will depends on how the victors and the citizens who back them find a way to keep their opponents from bringing the whole thing to a stop before it starts.