Can the people speak?

We all likely recall Bill Clinton's quip after the 2000 election, "the people have spoken; we just don't know what they said." The strange thing is that today's pundits have forgotten that split election. They seem also to have forgotten how close the 2004 election was. Why, then, are they consistently surprised that the Democratic primaries have resulted in a dead heat or, if you prefer, deadlock?

What appears in the Democratic primaries is the fact of division. Rhetorics of widespread discontent with the war, the direction of the country, the economy, the President, erase antagonism as they attempt to produce a single direction or tendency. Left laments of the loss of the political, conservative hegemony, and the triumph of hegemony do the same thing, they mask antagonism.

The two US parties don't represent division, but division manifests itself, nonetheless. It makes itself felt in the failure of the parties to represent it. The Republican primaries were actual choices: each candidate was insufficient, wrong. The field was weak.

Perhaps paradoxically division best appears under compulsion to choose when there are no grounds for choice. Clinton and Obama have similar plans, programs, voting records. What appears in the contest between them is the fact of division, just like in the past two elections, elections that nearly perfectly captured divide because there were no differences that mattered.

The media seems to want to force the people to speak, to tell us (the people) what we are saying, have said, and will said. Yet they are confounded. And they turn to graphics, to the image. They don't know what we are saying, but they imagine/have images for, the division.

Perhaps the last two elections, and the current primaries, best exemplify the best electoral politics can hope for: imagining antagonism.

And the result is a horrifying Real.