In far away Boston it is a different tea party as the Republicans celebrate their historic victory over their Democratic rivals in the by-election to fill the US Senate seat that the late Edward Kennedy held for forty seven years without a break. There is no connection at all between the two elections except to compare the workings of democracy, electoral politics, and government in vastly different circumstances.

President Obama could not have expected a worse first anniversary rebuff than the election of a little known Republican, Scott Brown, in one of the safest Democratic sanctuaries in the country, which is also the home of the Kennedys. Before Brown and Massachusetts the Democratic Party had 60 out of 100 Senators in the US Senate, the procedural benchmark required to overcome filibustering by Republican Senators. With Brown’s election the Democrats are reduced to 59 Senators and the Republicans can filibuster and delay any and every legislative initiative in the Senate.

Obama’s first mid-term test

Obama’s initiatives on health care, climate change and the regulation of financial institutions can now be delayed by the Republicans. To move ahead in the Senate with any of the President’s initiatives the Democrats will have to reach or win over a few Republican Senators who will extract concessions to please vested interests affected by the new initiative or to get some additional benefit for their particular States. A stand off in the Senate could tie up the Obama legislative agenda, or significantly weaken it.

Obama carried Massachusetts by over 60% in the 2008 presidential election. In the stunning reversal last week, the Democratic voters were not energized enough to go out and vote while independent voters crossed over to the Republicans. The Brown campaign took a page from the Obama handbook – using the internet to mobilize support and raise funds at a million dollars a day. One of the criticisms against Obama is over his abandoning the grass roots connections that carried him to power and his failure to mobilize them to support a radical legislative agenda.

Without public pressure he has been forced to compromise even with Senators from his own Party and weaken the controversial health care reform proposals. After Massachusetts, he might be forced to reconnect with the people and vigorously pursue a more populist agenda. He is already ratcheting up the rhetoric to re-regulate the deregulated banking and financial institutions whose passion for paper profits brought about the current global recession. He will have the people behind him but whether the Senate and the House will have the backbone to support him is a different matter.

In the canonically regular American system of elections the President is elected every four years, and the House of Representatives (Congress) and one third of the Senate are elected every two years. While each Senator has tenure for six years, the two Parties have the opportunity every two years to take control of the Senate and of course the House. The mid-term elections that come between Presidential elections are the barometers that indicate how a new President is faring and how good are his chances of reelection.

Obama’s first mid-term is due in November and the Massachusetts set back has already created concerns over November prospects. The Democrats lost control of the Senate and the House in Bill Clinton’s first mid-term in 1994, and the parallel is not lost on the two Parties and political pundits. Paradoxically, Obama has to perform better legislatively to regain his standing but he could be stifled by the Senators and Congressmen of his own Party facing re-election especially if they perceive that supporting a controversial agenda may cost them their seats. The government could become temporarily dysfunctional.

Sri Lankan Dystopia

The experience of a dysfunctional government is not new to Sri Lankans, although the causes of dysfunctional democracy in Sri Lanka are not the regularity of elections but the self-serving timing of elections, not the tying down of presidential powers but the abuse of them, and not a surfeit of checks and balances but the disregard for what are already there and the need for more. It is now conventional to trace the deterioration of our systems of politics and governance to the parliamentary tyrannies of the 1970s and the presidential system that followed them and now has the country in its grips.

Every President has contributed his or her mite to Sri Lanka’s systemic deterioration that now borders on a wholesale dystopia. The statement of the Ceylon Mercantile Union that was published in the Sunday Island last week is a stinging indictment of the current presidency and its record over the last four years. Pointed and comprehensive, the CMU statement is a rare manifestation of the diagnostic tradition of the Old Left by one of its dissident stalwarts, while the official residues of the Old Left are now folded among the back benches of a decadent regime, silent and invisible for the most part.

The ostensibly Left voices defending the regime are tiresomely old and for the wrong reasons. Their warnings of destabilization and circumambient imperialism are forty years too old. While the CMU statement takes to task the Rajapakse regime on the “National Question”, some of the Old Left and Post-Left commentators are whipping up ‘racial politics’ accusing the opposition candidate, a decorated soldier, of endangering national security.

The conclusion of the CMU statement is also a reflection of the helplessness of the whole country and the Hobson’s choice it faces: “… the re-election of President Rajapakse will only mean the continuance or even worsening of the living conditions of the working people, under the continuing political conditions of an already militarised society, in which democratic and human rights are no longer respected by the ruling regime. We have no reason to believe that General Fonseka will end this situation, and change it for the better, for the working people, with the political support of the UNP and JVP.”

I have taken a different tack in my last few articles – focusing objectively on the Fonseka candidacy as an opportunity for the people to revolt against the establishment with which the candidacy of Mahinda Rajapakse is politically and personally identified. Two weeks ago I wrote that the election is not a one one-horse race for Mahinda Rajapakse but a real contest between him and Sarath Fonseka. With only two days to go the election still seems too close to call.

The closeness of the contest might explain, although it cannot be the excuse for, the outbreak of violence and the abuse of state resources. The irony of the situation is also illustrated by General Fonseka’s warning that the government might stage a coup after the election – a retired General accusing a civilian President of plotting a coup. Tit for tat, it might seem in light of the government’s earlier claim that General Fonseka posed a military threat to civilian rule. But they are not funny – the charges and counter charges.

Tuesday’s election will be the sixth presidential election since 1982, when the first presidential election was held. In the 63 years after 1947, there have been 13 parliamentary general elections and the country will be going to the polls again before April this year, for its 14th general election. Sri Lanka was the first non-western country to exercise universal franchise starting in 1931, thanks to the experimental initiative of British colonial rulers giving all adults the right to vote regardless of gender, ethnicity, caste, income, property, education, or employment status. That could have been the formation of a modern Sri Lankan identity and the basis for an inclusive Sri Lankan citizenship. Karl Marx would have been ‘partially’ impressed by this development in a potty little, nascent political society under colonial rule.

Writing “On the Jewish Question”, in 1844, a very young Marx had held out the example of the then young United States of America as the model to follow for old Europe in the transition from feudal society to a bourgeois democracy centered on the concept of political citizen. Marx of course critiqued this as partial emancipation as opposed to total human emancipation. That would be too sublime a digression for this Sunday.

In 1931, the Sri Lankan experiment was ahead of what the US was not only in 1844 but also for nearly a hundred years later. Although Marx did not specifically point this out in his 1844 essay, the suffrage in America excluded women deemed less than equal to men, and the African Americans who were slaves and therefore not born equal or human. It would take a civil war and a century of struggle before these wrongs could be righted and the American Union could be more perfected.

Sri Lanka, in contrast, was given democracy on a far more perfect platter, but it has been growing more imperfect over the years. May be it was my wishful thinking that coming Tuesday would provide an opportunity to at least arrest the trend to imperfection, let alone reverse it. The CMU statement is not as wishful. But there is no disagreement that the people must have their say in a free and fair election unimpeded by violence in the South and vote-rigging in the North.