É uma eleição histórica, repete sem parar a mídia americana, não somente pela possível eleição do primeiro Presidente negro dos USA, argumenta um famoso jornalista na CNN, um outro, um divertido comediante comenta: voces não podem votar, mas esta eleição parece ser mais importante para voces do que para nos, americanos.
Afinal o que está em jogo nesta eleição? Esta é a questão endereçada, pela The New York Review of Books, a alguns dos seus colaboradores:Russell Baker,David Bromwich,Mark Danner,Andrew Delbanco,Joan Didion,Ronald Dworkin,Frances FitzGerald,Timothy Garton Ash,Paul Krugman,Joseph Lelyveld,Darryl Pinckney,Thomas Powers, Michael Tomasky e
Garry Wills.
Abaixo um trecho da contribuição do Dworkin:
"John McCain's election would be a disaster for our Constitution. Conservatives have worked for decades to capture the Supreme Court with an unbreakable majority that would, in every case, reliably serve their cultural, religious, and economic orthodoxies. That goal has so far escaped them. Though Republican presidents have appointed seven of the nine justices now serving, only four of them—John Roberts, Antonin Scalia, Clarence Thomas, and Samuel Alito—are dependably rigid conservatives. Four other justices—two other Republican appointees, John Paul Stevens and David Souter, and the Democratic appointees Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Stephen Breyer—have voted consistently in favor of more liberal interpretations of the Consti-tution. The ninth justice—Anthony Kennedy—holds the crucial "swing" vote that has decided cases of capital importance, sometimes with the conservatives and sometimes with the liberals.
In recent decades another justice, Sandra Day O'Connor, was also a "swing" justice. (She resigned in 2005 and Bush replaced her with Alito.) Our constitutional law would be very different if O'Connor and Kennedy had been conservative ideologues of the kind McCain has promised to appoint. They joined liberals, for example, in refusing to overrule Roe v. Wade and end constitutional protection for abortion rights, in preventing capital punishment of children under eighteen, and in protecting homosexuals against laws making sex between them a crime. O'Connor joined liberals to provide a 5–4 majority that saved race-sensitive admissions programs in state professional schools, a crucial decision that, had it gone the other way, would have ended what has proved an indispensable strategy for reducing racial"
Para ler o resto do artigo e a contribuição de outros colaboradores clique aqui
