Imagine if you woke up tomorrow morning in Bizarro World and John McCain was president. Scary, right? In devising a strategy both for the reelection of President Obama and the installation of a progressive Democratic congressional majority, it is worthwhile stopping to consider where we would be if John McCain and Sarah Palin had won the 2008 election.

Of course, in planning a strategy for the next 18 months, the discussion will extend well beyond the counter-factual arguments presented here about what might have happened if Obama had been defeated by Mcain-Palin. But applying a "Seinfeldian" worldview for a moment, as we contemplate the bizarre and disturbing world of a McCain-Palin presidency,  is a very effective way of  highlighting the extremely negative consequences of a Republican victory in 2012.

In terms of the key issues confronting us, Americans are today, in reality, in a far different place (and mostly a better one) than they would have been under a John McCain presidency.

First, the hateful rhetoric – that disturbing nexus of claims that President Obama's race, national origins and supposed religion marked him as lying outside of and possibly being a threat to the interests of "hard-working" (code for white, Christian, native-born) Americans – that characterized the McCain-Palin campaign would have been victorious. It cannot be underestimated the extent to which right-wing forces that rely on such claims would have felt empowered and emboldened, and indeed would have extended their control over the machinery of government. Instead of a concession speech announcing the "end of racism," McCain's victory speech would have been a lengthy white supremacist gloat. Following his election victory, racist forces fueled with unparalleled viciousness successful campaigns to pass anti-immigrant, racial-profiling laws in Arizona and Georgia. But if President McCain were sitting in the Oval Office, he wouldn't have directed the Department of Justice to challenge those laws in federal court.

The people and forces – hard right billionaires like the Koch brothers, corporate-funded conservative think tanks and front groups and Republican Party personalities – that drive the Tea Party would now be at the very center of power in the Republican Party. But if today there is palpable, sometimes self-destructive struggle between the Tea Party and the Republican establishment over control of the far-right and its agenda, after a McCain victory these forces would have been united.

On health reform, McCain campaigned and voted against reforms that are right now checking the enormous power of the health insurance companies. He opposed making it illegal for them to deny coverage based on previous conditions. He voted against expanding public programs like Medicaid and S-CHIP for the country's lowest income families, those who will now get coverage under President Obama's Affordable Coverage Act. And McCain also voted to block tax credits to help small business owners afford health care benefits for themselves and their employees.

One thing McCain did favor was taxing people's employer-sponsored health benefits. What the plan McCain favored did not do was to expand coverage to 31 million currently uninsured people (which Obama's health plan does, while also making health insurance more affordable for the rest). That was never the intention of the plan McCain favored. The goal was to force companies – especially small and medium-sized ones – to purchase cheaper, lower-quality health coverage for their employees so the bill's Republican sponsors (and, in turn, their insurance company donors) could claim that health care costs had gone down. The bill was a gimmick that did nothing to make quality, affordable health care available to the American people. If McCain had been elected, there would be no health care reform.

At home

In our alternative world where John McCain, like the Mad Hatter, sits grinning in the White House, there would be no stimulus package, or any of the economic benefits we have in reality seen (new jobs, jobs saved, infrastructure renewed, etc.). As a candidate McCain rejected all calls for a stimulus package – except in the form of more tax breaks for the big corporations and the wealthy. But this sort of misdirected "stimulus," as the state of the American economy today empirically demonstrates, has contributed next to nothing toward the creation of new jobs and economic stimulation. The wealthy already have everything they need, while the corporations are devoted to sharing their extra cash with shareholders or hoarding it in banks. Experience has now convincingly proven that the “trickle-down approach” first promoted by Reagan, has turned out never to have provided any economic stimulus (jobs!) at all.  During the debate on the Senate floor in January and February 2009, McCain rejected President Obama's stimulus package, which included aid to the states for education budgets and infrastructure investments, the largest clean energy investments ever, tax cuts for working families, the expansion of anti-poverty programs, and many other job-creating programs that are still, in the real world, putting hundreds of thousands of people to work today.

Also McCain would never have tried to put together an aid package for the U.S. auto industry before it completely collapsed. As he made clear during the 2008 presidential campaign, McCain believes manufacturing in the U.S. can just disappear and the government shouldn't lift a finger to stop it. "Have people lost jobs? Yes, they have, and they're gonna lose jobs," McCain remarked during the 2008 campaign on the collapse of the manufacturing sector. A McCain administration wasn't going to do much to rebuild manufacturing, he said. Six million jobs that economists say are tied, directly or indirectly, to the auto industry would vanish – or rather never have existed – in the middle of the worst recession since the 1930s. And President McCain wouldn't have batted an eye.

The world of John McCain is a zero-stimulus world. On this rightward-tilting planet the national unemployment rate would undoubtedly still be in the double digits, with no end in sight.

In terms of other domestic issues, such as economic equality for women ("equal pay for equal work") Pres. McCain would have immediately vetoed the Lily Ledbetter Fair Pay Act, a law that strengthens the hand of women workers to fight discrimination on the job. As a Senator, he downplayed the need to fight inequality by denouncing the law as creating an opportunity for "frivolous" lawsuits.

Debate over Wall Street reform would also either be completely stalled or off the table completely. McCain would never have taken steps to reform the credit card industry or the college student loan program, and he certainly would never have taken steps to strength environmental regulation and enforcement. On the environment, McCain did support a cap-and-trade program prior to the election of President Obama, but since then he has inexplicably worked to block it. With his record of flip-flopping on the issue, and given his party's fierce resistance to protecting the environment, it is hard to imagine how, as President, he could have any unused political capital to expend on environmental protections.

The Republicans' current state-by-state fight to end funding for Planned Parenthood would already be won – the law of the land on the federal level – if McCain sat in the Oval Office. There would have been no repeal of the "don't ask, don't tell" policy in the military, and the Justice Department would continue to defend the anti-gay Defense of Marriage Act in the courts.

Abroad

On foreign policy issues, we can be sure that 110,000 combat troops would still be in Iraq. Osama bin Laden would still be in hiding in Pakistan. Engaging Pakistan wouldn't even be on President McCain's radar. Under McCain it is extremely likely there would have been a disastrous war with Iran. Recall candidate McCain singing "bomb, bomb, bomb, bomb, bomb Iran" to the Beach Boys' timeless classic “Barbara Ann.”) The Arab Spring” would struggle on, close to withering, as the McCain administration undoubtedly would have supported repressive regimes and military dictatorships against the Arab people and their struggle for democracy. Israel would still be operating with a steady green light from the White House. U.S.-Cuba policy would not have budged an inch.

It is difficult to say what the McCain administration would have done in Afghanistan. McCain seemed little interested in that country during the campaign, in contrast with Obama (who, by the way, has done in Afghanistan, including the elimination of Osama bin Laden, the head of al Qaeda in neighboring Pakistan, exactly what he promised to do during the election campaign). Indeed, the McCain administration's foreign policy goals would have been primarily weighted toward militarism and intervention, organized around the same Bush-like adventurism that today fosters global hostility towards the U.S. Furthermore, the peace movement would have absolutely no influence or leverage on him. He simply wouldn't care what the peace movement, or any part of the people's movement, wanted.

McCain's foreign policy would be focused on fabricating a hostile relationship with Russia, as he sought to do in the run-up to the election. In the summer of 2008, McCain overstepped his position as a Senator and intervened in the Georgia-Russia conflict over South Ossetia after a referendum in which the province's residents voted for independence from Georgia. McCain sided with the right-wing authoritarian regime in Georgia against the independence vote, essentially making promises to them about how he'd help them out if elected. When the Russians intervened to oust Georgian military forces from South Ossetia, McCain pressed for sanctions against Russia. McCain's hostility toward Russia also extended to his support for a fiscally unsustainable and unworkable "Star Wars" missile defense system in Europe, widely regarded as little more than a provocation against the Russia. Further, in 2010 Sen. McCain voted against the new START treaty with the Russians which will eliminate hundreds of nuclear weapons, so it is very doubtful that such a deal would have been part of his presidential agenda. In McCain's world, the Cold War would be in full gear and peace wouldn't stand a chance.

Could this Bizarro World nightmare still come true?

If McCain had won the presidency, Republican attacks on workers' rights, now erupting at the state level in Wisconsin, Ohio, Indiana, New Jersey and elsewhere, would be enthusiastically backed by the federal government.  A frontal assault on the American labor movement and the right to join a union would be national government policy. So instead of debating an expansion of union rights under federal law – like passing the Employee Free Choice Act – we'd be debating whether it would be better for the U.S. to be a nonunion country.

Right now, Republicans are fighting tooth-and-nail to kill Medicare. Can you imagine what would be on the chopping block today if McCain had won the 2008 election? Social Security? Public education? Environmental research? OSHA or the EPA? The Department of Labor? McCain and the Republicans would have used the recession as an excuse – as they are doing now on the state and local level – to push right-wing "social engineering" programs, as former Republican frontrunner Newt “Breakfast at Tiffany's” Gingrich recently described it.

Under McCain, Republicans at the national, state and local level would be mounting a full-court press to gut public education, healthcare, Social Security, and environmental protections, along with any other programs that benefit America's working families. They would have pushed through even more tax breaks for the rich and super-rich (the second-fastest-growing income group in the USA today) with no strings attached, except perhaps a polite reminder about where campaign donations should be sent.

There would have been little or no response from the McCain administration to the BP oil spill, let alone any significant effort to enforce compensation from the company for this unprecedented environmental and economic disaster. The gobs of cash his party takes from Big Oil and the apology his party offered BP after the Obama administration ordered reparations for the spill says everything about McCain's love for oil.

In many ways, a McCain administration would actually have been far worse than the Bush presidency. With right-wing ideology and policies in the ascendant during the worst recession since the Great Depression, working families would have suffered tremendously.

Beginning now, there needs to be a straightforward discussion among progressives about what the most effective electoral strategy for 2012 is. The discussion should examine how to successfully reassemble the broad people's coalition that swept Obama into the White House in 2008. Our discussion needs to consider the ability of independent political structures to help progressive, labor-backed candidates win local, state, and national elections, while broadening the political enfranchisement of working-class Americans and their active participation in the democratic process (not just by casting a vote on Election Day). Plus we need to keep steadily in mind what is at stake in 2012.

The broad people's coalition effectively defeated McCain and Palin in 2008 and prevented the realization of the Bizarro World described above. Resisting Republican policies now is important, but because the GOP controls government at the state level, working families' demands will likely go unheeded. Therefore, harnessing this anger to mobilize a big electoral victory in 2012, including the reelection of the President, a progressive majority in Congress, and key state and local-level candidates and issues, will be just as important. The successes and shortcomings of the Obama administration, given the present balance of political forces, also need to be part of the discussion, and will be addressed in a future PA commentary.

Photo by PeoplesWorld/cc by 2.0/Flickr