American Bellyache

The US media has noted the offers of assistance from Iraq and Afghanistan. India is to send in aid to the US for the first time as well, but there’s less irony in that one. After all, as the new global common sense keeps informing us all, India is a rising Big Power.

But a more serious bellyaching may be underway in America. This is not just about the Bush presidency — though it is a bit about what the Weekly Standard admiringly feted this week as the ‘‘War Presidency’’ morphing into that which less enamoured sections of the media now dub as the ‘‘Stuff Happens Presidency’’ (a caustic take-off on Donald Rumsfeld’s punch line after the looting of Baghdad’s museums while American soldiers stood around). This moment is not strictly about Bush. He is in his second term and under America’s two-term rule, won’t face the voters again. This is really about the America and the American state Bush has presided over and reshaped, especially after 9/11.

From a distance, Jonathan Freedland, columnist in the Guardian, could see at least two possible changes that could outlast the storm. One, America has always swung between international engagement and isolationism, he wrote, and the hurricane may well have put Americans in the latter mood. As Adrian Wooldridge, co-author of a study of conservative America, ‘The Right Nation’, writes, ‘‘The big losers among Republicans will be neocons. The hubris of thinking America could reshape the world, creating democracy in hostile territory, when it can’t even keep order in an American city — that hubris has just been punctured in a big way’’.

Two, Katrina may have re-opened the debate on the limited state in the home of neoliberalism. ‘‘Suddenly progressive Americans detect an opening, a chance to speak up for active government, even for taxing and spending.’’ Freedland, himself, was doubtful about whether the progressives would go very far, though. For one, they have no persuasive leadership to make the ‘‘post-Katrina case for an active caring government’’. For another, the Department of Homeland Security, the massive federal bureaucracy created in response to the calls for more government action after 9/11, failed on Katrina. The most likely result, suggested Freedland, is that America won’t rethink the size of government so much as its efficiency.

Conservative columnists are calling for federal governance, New York style. They are asking for someone like Rudy Giuliani in Washington.

Polls and outcomes

The people are going to polls across the world and, by all accounts, the outcomes will be democratic in different senses of the term.

In Japan, Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi, showman and lone ranger, who cuts through his own party to appeal directly to voters in a parliamentary democracy, has called an early election. The issue is the reform of the national post system. But it is Koizumi’s stagecraft and his spectacle that is proving far more newsworthy. He has, reports Time this week, banned the anti-reformers or ‘‘rebels’’, and recruited a new set of candidates to run for the party. These new recruits are called the shikaku, or the ‘‘assassins’’. They are prominently female, young and telegenic.

In Pakistan’s local elections, the religious parties in the border areas of Balochistan and NWFP have lost ground. The two mainstream parties, led by the exiled former prime ministers Benazir Bhutto and Nawaz Sharif, have lost even more ground. A vote of confidence for the General? The Economist warned foreign observers against optimism about the ‘‘consolidation of one-party rule behind a general’’, through means suspected to have been more foul than fair.

The people of Egypt voted this week in an election that some like the Washington Post hailed as the largest experiment in electoral democracy in the Middle East and which others like Britain’s Financial Times have pronounced to be a ‘‘flawed poll’’. Mubarak ‘‘doesn’t stand a chance of losing’’ confirmed Newsweek. He has presided over the ruling party — and its painstakingly crafted patronage system — for 24 long years. Mubarak won.

But Egypt’s first multi-candidate race still had its ‘‘unscripted moments’’, agreed observers. It is this that makes Egypt’s Al Ahram Weekly hold out: ‘‘Whatever the shortcomings, the presidential campaign has raised the expectations of citizens, newspaper readers and television viewers… Those that fail to deliver will not be easily forgiven.’’

In Iraq, they’re heading towards a referendum next month on the draft Constitution. This week, Time reported that according to UN officials, most Iraqis will not be able to get a hard copy of the much revised 39-page document until October 16 at the earliest — a day after the October 15 referendum.