by Bob Avakian, Chairman of the Revolutionary
Communist Party, USA

Revolution #3, May 22, 2005,
posted at revcom.us

Bush has no legitimate mandate. The will of the people was
not expressed in the 2004 election—not only because of
voter intimidation and fraud, which there definitely was some of,
but beyond all that, and most essentially, because the people
were not given a real choice. They were not given a real avenue
in which they could express their opposition to what is
represented by Bush. The real story of what is happening and the
alternative to it was never presented in the election—certainly
it was not presented by Kerry and the Democrats.

On Mandates... Liars... And the Will of the People

by Bob Avakian, Chairman of the Revolutionary
Communist Party, USA

Revolution #3, May 22, 2005,
posted at revcom.us

Bush has no legitimate mandate. The will of the people was
not expressed in the 2004 election—not only because of
voter intimidation and fraud, which there definitely was some of,
but beyond all that, and most essentially, because the people
were not given a real choice. They were not given a real avenue
in which they could express their opposition to what is
represented by Bush. The real story of what is happening and the
alternative to it was never presented in the election—certainly
it was not presented by Kerry and the Democrats.

Bush was never straight-up called a liar and called to account
for his lying, just to take one basic thing. There were three
presidential debates and one vice-presidential debate, and yes,
"misleading" was tossed around by Kerry and the Democrats, but
never was Bush called out as a liar and called to account for his
lying around Iraq and other things. The Democrats refused to do
it because, especially on the most crucial issues such as the war
in Iraq, they shared the same fundamental program as the
Republicans.

So, the fact that nobody can really dispute is this: never was
this whole program of Bush's frontally opposed, never was a real
alternative offered to people, and particularly never over such
crucial things as the war in Iraq or the Patriot Act. Kerry and
the Democrats did not say, "Get rid of the Patriot Act"—Kerry
said, "We should fix it." Kerry and the Democrats did not say,
"Bush lied, about weapons of mass destruction and other things,
to get us into Iraq, and we should get out." Kerry said, "Bush
made a mess of it and now you need to elect me so I can win this
war."

It is clear that the will of the people could not possibly
be expressed, because they were not given any real
alternative.

And people who supported Bush were never really
confronted with the fact that Bush is a fucking liar—that he
took the country to war and has killed thousands and thousands of
people in that war on the basis of flagrantly and brazenly lying
before the whole world. He was never called to account for that.
So people who thought they could rely on Bush to protect them
were never even confronted with that fact—of his outright lying
and everything that goes along with that—in any real way.
Certainly not in the context of this election—not by the
candidate, Kerry, who was supposed to represent the "realistic
alternative" to Bush.

A lot of exposure can and must be done around all this.

The central message is that we do not accept this election and
its so-called "mandate," we do not accept this whole program, and
we need to manifest a massive repudiation of it in all kinds of
forms. And in this we have to build a very broad unity, with a
wide diversity of forces. We should try to unleash a lot of
creativity around what that would mean—in the cultural sphere,
in the overtly political sphere, in whatever spheres people are
in. We should not aim low. We should aim high. We should call on
people by saying: "This is too important just to go along with
it—there is too much at stake for the whole world to just go
along with this." As we pointed out in our Party's statement,
right after the election "#footnote1">¹ "footnote1return">, we have to have not just the attitude of
letting it be known that we don't agree with this, but an
orientation of actually stopping it. This program of
Bush's is completely unacceptable.

And then we do need to go deeply into the basic point that the
people were denied the chance to really express their will in
this election. That question is going to come up, even from
people who hate this program represented by Bush: "Well, yes, but
people voted for it." So we need to speak to that. At the same
time, there is already a broad and deep sentiment—"No Mandate!"
We need to build on that and give it the maximum possible, most
powerful political expression.

And there needs to be struggle with many progressive people to
help them sum up correctly what happened through this election.
Some of them got caught up in trying to blame Nader—even in
advance of the election—for Bush's staying in office. But the
real point is that Kerry and the Democrats did not—and, more
fundamentally, could not —offer a real alternative. It
is crucial that people, as broadly as possible, draw the
appropriate and correct lessons from all this, and that will take
struggle, even as we are uniting with people to carry forward
resistance in the circumstances where Bush remains in office and
is aggressively accelerating his program in every sphere of
society, and throughout the world.

In a lot of cases, when the masses turned out to vote in this
(2004 election), even though they were not given any real
alternative, it was a positive thing—or had a very definite
positive side—it was a politicizing of the masses on a not so
terrible basis. The bourgeoisie partly created the
atmosphere—they created a politically charged atmosphere for
their own reasons—but it hasn't all been, or remained, on their
terms completely. The atmosphere is very politicized, and there
is a lot of potential to turn this into something very positive,
in more immediate terms and looking beyond that toward strategic
revolutionary objectives. But, again, that will take work, and
struggle.