#6 - JRL 8041
From: Gideon Lichfield <gideonlichfield@economist.com>
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gideonlichfield@yahoogroups.com
Date: Fri, 30 Jan 2004 12:31:35 +0300
Subject: Gideon - Moscow 43 - Do I look Presidential?
Writing about a presidential election in which there is only one real candidate and none of the others even pretends to want to win is, to put it gently, a challenge. I have avoided it for as long as possible. My colleagues have been reduced to scouring the candidate lists for every bit of colour they can find.
Thus there have been several paeans to the boxing skills and body art of Vladimir Zhirinovsky's beefy former bodyguard, who is running as the candidate for Zhirinovsky's Liberal Democrats because not even Zhirinovsky, the professional clown of Russian politics, could bring himself to participate in such a joke of an election. Gentle fun has been made of Sergei Mironov, the speaker of the Federation Council, who is also running - not against Putin, but in support of him, because he says that Putin "should not be alone". You can imagine our distress when, early on in the proceedings, the authorities disqualified one of the pretenders, German Sterligov, a coffin magnate. Think of the metaphors we could have spun about the death of Russian democracy; I come to be Caesar, not to bury him; Beware the Ides of March; and so on.
But is American politics any better? In the California governor's race there was a former professional beefcake too, who didn't only run, he won; and given that his 134 competitors included a porn actress and a porn publisher, nobody was even surprised. Russian intellectuals fret about the fact that Vladimir Putin occasionally puts the stress on the wrong syllable in certain verbs, but the American presidential incumbent can rarely say a whole sentence free of grammatical mistakes or logical absurdities unless he is reading it off a teleprompter.
Moreover, something about the raw, unashamed barbarity of Russian politics makes it somehow much more real. At the polling stations in the Duma election in December, anyone who wanted to look could make a well-informed decision about how honest their candidates were: Mr Sterligov, for instance, who has been a leading businessman for over a decade, was listed as having no income, and Yury Luzhkov, the mayor of Moscow, whose wife is a major force in the capital's property-development business, claimed to own just one car, Russian-made. American politicians, on the other hand, look as if they have been airbrushed every morning after getting out of bed, then subjected to psychological surgery to ensure they don't say anything that a focus group might construe as unpresidential. They might be serial killers or grand embezzlers or deficit spenders and nobody would have a clue.
And when they do veer off the straight and narrow, woe betide them. That Howard Dean could go from the Democratic top spot to political oblivion, just because he went a little crazy at a campaign meeting and let out a bloodcurdling scream, stumps me. When Putin lets his frustration show by lapsing into prison slang and talks about castrating journalists or wasting terrorists in the outhouse, people just shrug: clearly, it means he's flesh and blood like the rest of us.