I have come to this conclusion reluctantly, because I'd hate to see it actually happen.
It would be an indicator that the level of orchestration by the corporate establishment of America's electoral process has reached an all-time high in terms of cynicism.
Worse, it would probably work.
It's no secret that Mark Penn has been an influential player in the candidacy of Hillary Clinton, or that Charlie Black has been McCain's top lobbyist, er, campaign advisor. It's public knowledge that both Penn and Black run (or, if Black is to be believed, ran) companies that are wholly-owned subsidiaries of a single parent corporation, the WPP Group. The WPP Group is a giant multinational public relations conglomerate that owns upwards of 140 companies. Black's former company, BKSH, does things like lobby on behalf of Ferdinand Marcos and Zaire's Mobutu Sese Seko as well as United Technologies, which recently tried to buy Diebold for $40/share. (That deal was rebuffed because the "timing wasn't right" -- AKA people are looking.)
Why would a company like United Technologies, a huge corporation with billions in government defense contracts, want to buy a company that ostensibly deals in ATMs and electronic voting machines? The electronic voting machine business, according to the Wall St. Journal, is not a particularly profitable one unless it enabled someone to, say, influence the outcome of an election that could be quite lucrative to a company involved in defense contracting.
The problem with these fascists is that they don't have the kind of imagination it takes to truly take over and turn America into a force for permanent global corporatist hegemony. Or do they?
We'll see. If they did, they'd be promoting the transformational idea of a John McCain/Hillary Clinton ticket for '08. They could do it easily enough -- the two campaigns already share a common foe and have united against him. All they really need to do is dress it up in red, white and blue and market the hell out of it all summer.
McCain sure could use Hillary's 17,000,000 or so votes, or at least that proportion of them that can be counted on to vote white (which, if you listen to Hillary, is the better part of them). Such a ticket would appeal to white Americans worried that the Muslims are trying to conquer us, to the so-called Reagan Democrats as well as to open-minded Republicans longing for a return to the imaginary-money heyday of the 1990s.
Most importantly, it would appeal to the corporate interests whose collective ox stands to be Gored, so to speak, by an anti-establishment, people-powered candidacy like Obama's. There are certainly no real political differences standing in the way of such a nightmarish Unity ticket, and it would catch fire if presented properly as a broad-minded solution to the division of American society.
There are two sides in the larger fight, and it's only now starting to emerge that the battle line is not where conventional wisdom has told us it lies -- between the Dems and Republicans. Instead, it's where it's always been, between the haves and the have-nots, the ins and the outs. It's POLISCI 101 that these are the two sides the world over, and those on the inside have only gotten more and more entrenched over the last 30 years.
Opposition to such a ticket would be from the far-right and far-left, the Hillary-haters (but who are they, now that Rush Limbaugh is on board after spending the last 16 years helping to build a cottage-industry of anti-Clintonism?) and the "loony left" that wants God to damn America and wants America to appease its enemies. Such opposition is easily marginalized, though the Internet makes it stronger in terms of fundraising and organizing. Get control over that, and they're all set to roll out the new rules.
It'd be a political master stroke to pull it off. The alternative plan, to cancel the 2008 elections in partial response to a new national emergency of some sort, is such a cartoonish longshot by comparison that it makes me wonder what they're waiting for.
T.