And the Winner Is … George W. Bush

The presidential debate on Monday night — the last one before the vote on November 6 — ended with a clear winner. Contrary to what was reported by “instant pools” [sic] conducted as soon as the curtain fell, however, the winner’s name isn’t Barack Obama. And it’s not Willard Mitt Romney, the Republican challenger — who in these same surveys was said to be a rather clear-cut and somewhat dejected loser — either. No, the real winner of the night was, for all intents and purposes, George W. Bush, himself. The invisible, unnamable George W. Bush, the great “disappeared” from the Republican iconography, the empty space in the family photos of the American right. Or — if you’re looking at it from the other side of the fence — the gruesome specter, a scarecrow that Democrats trot out, when attacked, to reignite the horror of a past that never ceases to be present.

Monday night, no one — not Romney, of course, nor Obama, nor Bob Schieffer, the seasoned moderator of the debate — actually said his name. Nobody called him. No one conjured him, overpraised him, rebuked him or repudiated him. And yet he, as an eminent force, guided everyone’s words. Because he, of all people, George W. Bush (and the “neocons” who, in their time, pulled the strings that moved him) belongs to the policies — which with very noisy, but very little substantial differences in accents — the two duelists were showing off yesterday in Boca Raton.

It was a strange debate — that frayed debate in Florida. By decision of the special commission (a decision agreed upon by the parties) the confrontation was to be dedicated exclusively to international politics. But — evidently conscious of the problems that most afflict voters today — Obama, as much as Romney, took advantage of every window of opportunity to move the conversation in the direction of domestic policy and the economy. Schieffer asked how they thought they’d cope with the growth of Chinese power. Romney instantly replied, re-proposing his chorus of 12 million new jobs that his unspecified plan (defined by many economists as “pure fantasy”) intends to create, without fail, with him as president, over the next four years. While Obama who, for his part, gave Romney an immediate and scornful ringing, recalling how one of Obama’s plans (a real one, not one written in the clouds) — that Romney and the entire Republican establishment had so hopefully gone against — had, in these much vilified four years, saved the American auto industry (and its related jobs) from bankruptcy.

Each time, however, that they couldn’t help but talk about international politics, both sides stayed within the framework of the “war on terror” that George W. Bush and the “neocons” drew up after the attacks on Sept. 11, 2001. Obama was showing the corpse of Osama bin Laden — and all those corpses accumulated in recent years, thanks to the policy of “selective” assassinations implemented by unmanned aircraft “drones” — as the most succulent prey in his presidential game bag. Romney was insisting — with arguments defined by The New York Times, as “confused and contradictory” — on an increase (in the face of a policy of deficit reduction) in military spending, always for the sake of “anti-terrorism,” but in reality founded on an old “gunboat policy” logic.

The press tells us today that Romney lost the debate. And that he lost right when he plaintively reported that the U.S. Navy has fewer ships now than it had in 1916, thus setting Obama up for the joke that, in fact, decided the fate of the confrontation. “Well, Governor, we also have fewer horses and bayonets because the nature of our military has changed,” the president answered, reminding him how technology had, in the last century, changed the concept of military force.

One to zero, with the ball in the center. Actually, (considering all three debates), it’s 2 to 1, at the final whistle. However, it remains a fact that, beyond the results entailed by “instant polls” in this debate, winners and losers have in substance essentially reaffirmed the strategic priority of what George W. Bush called the first “War of the Twenty-first Century.” There is no longer, it’s true — looking at the words of Barack Obama’s Nobel Peace Prize, as well as Romney’s “moderate” words as he’s trying to sell himself in this final phase of the campaign — a trace of the “endless war,” that gave the world the not-yet-healed wounds of Iraq and Afghanistan. But the logic remains the same. And with this logic, given the state of things, it seems that there’s only marginal and occasional room for a world characterized — beyond the ongoing terrorist threat — and now marked by momentous changes, in the midst of a global economic crisis, to give rise to new forces and a new consciousness.

The world — the real world — was and actually is the great absentee in this debate dedicated to the world. No matter who wins on Nov. 6, it’s a bad sign for everyone.