The US presidential election has three lessons for India's politicians — conceit can make you feel bigger than life; trust opinion polls only to a point; leaders must desist from talking down to people and labelling them as the ‘other'
So the long and tortuous presidential election in the United States of America is at last over. The world’s most powerful country — for all its financial clout, China is yet to make it to the top — has a new President who will take over from Barack Obama in January next year. The world’s oldest democracy has reaffirmed faith in the process of universal adult franchise, well, almost.
But first the results of what was arguably a very bitterly fought election that saw both the main candidates, Donald Trump, the outsider contesting as the Republican nominee, and Hillary Clinton, representing the Democrats and the
Establishment, hurling sufficient mud at each other to keep cartoonists and commentators busy. Trump emerged the winner, but neither he nor Hillary was smelling of roses on the night of counting.
We in India are familiar to such mud-slinging; accusations are fast turning into slander making the landscape of political discourse, especially during election time, extremely bleak and depressing though the lowest common denominator, as in America, seems to enjoy this spiralling descent into abuse and worse. Scandalous photographs and bedroom videos are already par for the course in this country too.
Most of the world believes that Americans are blessed to directly elect their President — they don’t need to depend on the party or its elected lawmakers and their collective wisdom, or for that matter, the ‘leadership’, the term used for hereditary party leaders whose divine right it is to either rule or decide who gets to be the ruler but remain at their mercy. But that’s not quite so. The US system is such that more votes do not automatically ensure victory.
The final tally looks something like this. Of the 231,556,622 eligible voters in America, 46.9 per cent did not vote. That’s a huge ‘no show’ on voting day. Of the remaining voters, 25.6 per cent voted for Hillary and 25.5 per cent voted for Trump. Yet it is Trump who gets to be President, not Hillary, because he had more electoral votes than her — nearly 20 more than the 270 needed to bag the presidency.
Now that the Democrats have lost, they have begun raising questions about a system that does not reward the candidate with the most votes. The last time we heard them raising this issue was when George W Bush won the election, defeating Al Gore, in 2000. This is the fourth occasion when the winner has fewer votes than the loser, but there’s no purpose in pointing this out because both candidates played the game knowing well what the rules were.
Whether President Trump will serve his country well and “Make America Great Again” is something that is best commented upon, now and later, by Americans. From a purely Indian perspective, narrow and selfish, chances are that a Trump presidency will be good for India. Our experience with Republican Presidents has been far better than with Democrats. We need to just recall Bill Clinton’s first term to realise the potential of Hillary doing a repeat show — he had Robin Raphel stomping all over already anaemic India-US relations; she would have had Huma Abedin stomping all over India-US relations that have gathered strength in the years since George W Bush gave a huge boost to them.
Contrary to what Delhi’s liberal opedists and chattering classes, each mirroring the other in their worldview, would want us to believe, just because they have willed themselves into believing it, Hillary would not have been good news for India or the sub-continent. There are far too many reasons to back up this view, not just her past record of seeking to undermine the present Prime Minister, who was then the Chief Minister of Gujarat.
Which brings us back to the question: Will Trump prove to be good for India-US relationsIJ The jury is still out there but the little we know it’s likely he will. let’s not forget that in the early days of his campaign, George W Bush didn’t know the name of India’s Prime Minister. Will Trump be better than ObamaIJ Again, it remains to be seen whether he will be more than a ‘good friend’ who is willing to walk the extra mile.
Campaign rhetoric like clamping down on immigration by skilled workers and returning outsourced jobs to Americans is rarely translated into policy. Trump was not the first candidate to indulge in such rhetoric, nor shall he be the last. In brief, those with an H1B visa and those in the queue need not worry, at least in the short term.
That, however, should be the least of India’s concerns. What would be important is the willingness Trump expresses in his Administration working with the Government of India to take bilateral relations and strategic ties to the next level. Also, the role he plays, like Bush did and Obama didn’t, in pushing the envelope for India’s inclusion in the Nuclear Suppliers Group. There are other issues too, for instance, determining India’s role in stabilising Afghanistan, the rapidly deteriorating security situation in India’s western neighbourhood, strategic cooperation, trade and transfer of high end technology. The agility and rapidity with which Trump moves on them will determine the course of India-US relations during the next four years.
No comment on the US election would be complete without mentioning the astonishing failure of the American media and its pundits to get the electoral outcome even remotely right. Everybody was predicting a victory for Hillary, except Trump and his core supporters. The New York Times, the last bastion of glib liberalism, had devised a meter to gauge popular opinion and extrapolate that into winning chances. It indicated a 95 per cent chance that Hillary would win hours before voting began. By the time counting was drawing to a close, the meter showed the reverse.
The New York Times was not alone in getting its sums awfully wrong. Every pollster got every opinion poll wrong, disproving the claim that America has fine-tuned its polling to a point where predictions can never be wrong. Smug in their belief that Hillary would slay the ‘dragon’ and become the first woman President of the US, they just ignored the possibility of an upset defeat. Newsweek even went ahead and printed a special commemorative edition that had to be trashed.
Facts that have emerged from this American presidential election offer three lessons to India’s politicians and their political parties. First, conceit, or call it hubris if you will, can make you feel bigger than life, a pharaoh who can never be either wrong in gauging popular opinion or defeated in electoral battle. On election day journalist Barkha Dutt, who creditably made no effort to hide her support for Hillary, tweeted from what was to be the venue of the Democrats’ victory celebrations in New York, “And may the best woman win tonight. like it’s even a choice.”
That sentence, “like it’s even a choice”, formed the core of the Democrats’s campaign. The liberals in the US and around the world bought into it. Barkha Dutt was merely echoing their sentiment. In the event, it did not prove to be the sentiment of the masses. Trump’s supporters who remained silent all through the campaign (airing their support on Facebook which prompted a sentiment map that fits into the final electoral map) went and voted for their candidate and against Hillary.
It happens. Number crunching to predict electoral outcome often misses the pulse of popular choice. Elections are more than votes; they are an expression of human sentiment. Numbers don’t capture that sentiment. Which brings us to the second lesson: Trust opinion polls only to a point. Trusting them beyond that point could recoil horribly.
linked to that is media reportage, especially by mainstream media. Don’t let headline either deflate your confidence or inflate your hopes. Ignore them if you can, or just do your thing. Social media may not be a perfect barometer, but it’s rapidly turning out to be more reliable than mainstream media. The Facebook sentiment analysis that predicted a Trump victory shows politicians have to be creative to assess their chances.
Third, though not the least, politicians who aspire to win elections should desist from talking down to people and labelling them as the ‘other’, the undesirable, the unwashed, meant to be shamed and not engaged in dialogue. Hillary and her campaign managers were constantly talking down to people; her liberal supporters were constantly spewing venom, labelling perceived opponents as ‘racist’, ‘bigoted’, ‘misogynist’ and ‘morons’. It is possible some were indeed so, but it is unlikely all were. An analysis of Trump voters shows that many of them voted for Obama and many more were Democrats in the past. The White working class has drifted away and it is for the Democrats and the liberals to find out why.
All this and more can form a fascinating study for Indian politicians, to understand global trends in voter choices that are increasingly revolving around voting against the Establishment. The rise of the Right is not coincidental — in India and the world. But the Right, such as it is at least in India, cannot take its rise for granted. After all, in power the Right is the Establishment. Can it recast the form and substance of the Establishment to keep its support intact and attract new supportIJ
(The writer is commissioning editor and commentator at ABP News TV)