We have been uncharacteristically silent regarding politics this year and the midterm elections are approaching rapidly. In the gubernatorial race we are content with the knowledge that whichever candidate wins, Georgia will get a competent Governor. Both candidates are flawed; each has stretched the truth about the other, but they are both basically decent men and cut from nearly the same cloth: a little scratchy around the collar but wears well. No matter who wins, Georgia will manage.
We are less than content with national politics, still smarting from how quickly the “lesser of evils” presidential candidate caved in to the big banks. We think Obama is also a decent man, but arrogant, insulated and ill advised. The economic problems he inherited were at least 20 years in the making, but he surrounded himself from the beginning with the same people who helped create the problems - people as removed from mainstream American life as the average American is from an Aborigine. Reminds us a little of George W. Bush, but no, we don’t “miss him yet,” as the famous billboard asks. We do miss the political savvy of Johnson, the sense of hope engendered by Reagan and the integrity of Jimmy Carter.
We like to give people (and politicians) the benefit of the doubt when we can. It is better for the digestion that way; but apparently Obama and his advisers still believe that the survival of the entire American economy is dependent on a handful of gigantic investment banks. We strongly disagree. We think that Greed is advising the President as we watch banking behemoths gradually digesting small town banks all across the country. The majority of our media is owned by only a half dozen corporations and the financial industry seems set to follow the same course.
We are not concerned at the probability that the Republicans may gain control of the Senate and win many seats in the House. Our Democratic Congress with its clear majority has managed to accomplish very little. It took the serious problem of healthcare and turned it into a disaster. Everyone agreed that healthcare should have been overhauled, but the shiny chrome of a shared ideal, when it was exposed to the battery acid of backroom deals, lobbyists and political maneuvering, turned into something just plain ugly. If the Republicans win the Senate, it may well be worth it if they can dismantle the wreckage of Obamacare.
There is some hope, perhaps, in the growing level of anger and disgust with government which is shared by so many Americans. Unfortunately we have little hope for a movement as conflicted as the Tea Party as long as it is influenced to any degree by racism and religious intolerance or guided in ANY way by the ambitions and self promotions of a Sarah Palin. We had hoped that Palin would quietly fade away without any further fragmentation of the Republican Party. Our best hope for her now is that, like a net used to clean the floating debris from the top of the swimming pool, she will at least gather together the reactionaries and nuthatches so that they can be addressed as a group. Anger can be a positive agent for change if it is focused intelligently, but unfortunately it can also make us vulnerable to the likes of Palin. Sadly, if it wasn’t her, it would be someone else. Someone has always been willing to lead the mob and, lacking a mob to lead, to help create one.
Anger with government is widespread. We are fed up with the lack of integrity that exists in Washington, in state capitols and in county seats. Alexis de Tocqueville said that in a democracy, we get the government we deserve. When we allow the ambitions of political candidates to frame our choices in terms of so many common fallacies; when we allow candidates to paint their ideas in such broad strokes while we listen for key words which identify them as one of “us” or one of “them,” the result is permanently polarized political parties at the extremes and a disempowered majority in the middle to push the pendulum in one direction or another as our frustration with one side becomes our hope for the other.
Too many of us vote for the candidate who best pretends to sympathize with our own fears and prejudices, which are of absolutely no use when a candidate is actually elected. Whether a candidate worships god in the same way as we do, or at all; what a candidate believes about conception or capital punishment or gun control or what people choose to put in their own bodies or what they choose to do with their own bodies in the privacy of their own homes - and a host of other “issues,” has no effect on a candidate’s ability to govern. Our favorite “issues” do not predict a candidate’s ability to build a consensus, to manage an economy, to create jobs, to maintain infrastructure and to protect us from enemies. Our favorite talking point issues are utterly useless in gauging a candidate’s ability to maintain freedom, opportunity and stability. While divided, we are conquered. Gullible and easily manipulated, with each passing year we lose a little more freedom and a little more opportunity – no matter what political party is in power.
