Although the result of the 2010 General Election may be not yet be history, for those who do not live and breathe politics, it probably can’t come soon enough. Political campaigns are a visceral, bile excreting, inflammation of the psyche. They inflame the fears on the left just as surely as they do on the right. There seems to be no logic, no repentance, no forgiveness, and no quarter given. Even the most trivial speck in the candidate’s past becomes a one-week sensation before running to the next byte of minutiae.
V. O. Key, Jr., the great Harvard political scientist, wrote more than four decades ago in his little book, The Responsible Electorate, that “voters are not fools.” Whatever politicians may think the voters ought to be thinking to decide how they will vote, the marketplace of ideas has a hidden hand just as surely as the economic marketplace does, and voters will express their will based on their own set of values no matter what is fed them through a billion dollars of negative advertising and pithy sound bites on the nightly news followed by ideologically slanted commentary.
Unfortunately, as usually happens near the end of an election, when people are “tuned in” but “tapped out,” issues give way to character assassination. The adage “if you can’t beat them on the issues, confuse them with the facts; if you can’t confuse them with the facts, destroy their character” is in full swing. The large majority of voters complain every two years about negative advertising in campaigns, but the overwhelming consensus is that they work.
That is why even the terms “winner” and “loser” may not be very descriptive except for who gets to vote and who has to pay their own debts. Whoever wins (yes, I said wins) immediately becomes the most detested politician in the state (and the loser the second most.) In the atmosphere of today’s politics, this may be an accurate description of this year’s election winners’ fate. I truly have seen 40 years of deterioration in the civic dialog that pains and saddens me.
If you think that the rhetoric of the campaign season has never seemed so long, so negative and so confusing, just wait until the 2012 Presidential Campaign begins on November 3rd — the day after this year’s election is over. Because of the need to grab headlines and nightly news by Presidential candidates — where debate about serious issues can only last eight seconds — the sink into the trivial will happen sooner and will last longer than in any election that preceded it. If issues are the backdrop to describe the character and vision of the candidate, then we’re in for a bumpy ride.
Let’s face it. While the political class may chatter about inconsequential secondary (or even tertiary) issues and events (i.e., who is a witch, who knew her hired help didn’t have a green card, etc.), the public will make up its mind on more substantive things.
The overwhelming issues of this year’s campaign didn’t need one year of debate. They didn’t need six months of debate. They are complex policy questions, yet in a campaign context they are quite straightforward. And, as always, they all deal with the incumbents.
The Three Questions Voters Ask
The First Question Voters Ask Themselves: “Do we want the incumbent Democrats to continue to lead this country?” If the answer is “yes,” then the election is over. That was the case in 2002, when the Republican Congress ran for re-election. The Democrats were never in it. It was over before it began.
The Second Question. If the answer to the First Question is “no,” then the voters will ask themselves: “Then, are we willing to let the Republicans to lead this country again?” If the answer is “yes,” then it is a dogfight, but the GOP will probably win. Just as the Democrats did to the incumbent Republicans in 2006 and 2008.
Third. If the answer to the second question is “no, we don’t want to take a chance on turning back to the Republicans to lead the country,” then the incumbent Democrats will win by default. That’s the “lesser of two evils winner” scenario.
This is particularly true this year. Having just tossed the Republicans out (and some of us believe for good reason); and, with frustration, anger and fear at an all-time high; voters seem to be ready to shift again to the non-incumbents. This would appear to benefit the Republicans. But, make no mistake: if the overwhelming majority of polls are accurate, then the voters are poised to vote against Democrats more than they are ready to vote for Republicans. The Republican Party is no more popular than the Democrats. They just happen to be the “other Party” this time. That’s the way it is. The Tea Party movement is direct evidence of this.
The Three Issues
As for the issues themselves, in any given election the voters’ decision will revolve around one or more of three generic issue groups: war and peace, black and white, and bread and butter.
War and peace today means Afghanistan and Iraq; by extension it means the war on terror, but that is not controversial. Someone once said that the measure of a true leader is not how he handles a crisis, but how he handles a mess. Well, Afghanistan is a mess and everyone knows it. It is the ultimate laboratory of whether or not democracy as we know it is truly the aspiration of all people.
America (and NATO, for that matter) is deciding whether to stay in the laboratory of democracy or get out. The alternative is to turn it back over to the Afghans. Then, it could really fall apart.
But, it’s really more than Afghanistan. Having been at war for longer than at any time in its history, and with no real end in sight, it probably is time for America to re-examine the original question: should the United States military be engaged in “nation-building” in the first place? And, weapons of mass destruction or not, what is the moral basis for pre-emptive action by the military (such as in Iraq)? Ultimately, this is for the voters to decide … but not this year.
Black and white means the social issues. It’s everything from abortion and gay marriage to social justice and immigration. These are the issues that have pushed the political “hot buttons” for four decades … but not this year. They hardly show a blip on the political radar. The only candidates who are talking about these issues are those that are losing.
Bread and butter was best summed up by Ronald Reagan’s question to the American people in 1980: “Are you better off today than you were four years ago?” This is simple: not the stock market, the growth in GNP, the balance of trade, or any other macro mush. It’s about “me.” Period.
The 2010 General Election
This is what the 2010 General Election is about. It is focused on the growth of government in our lives (health care legislation, for example); trillions in government spending (“stimulus money”); and, multinational corporate and union bailouts.
It appears likely that the public verdict will be about what the voters perceive all of this is going to do to them, their children and their grandchildren.
If the pollsters are correct, voters don’t like where all this is going. We’ll soon see how that translates out in actual votes.
I am reminded of a column written by Art Buchwald back when Jimmy Carter was president. Carter decided to swoop down on the doorstep of unsuspecting Americans around the country and surprise them by asking their opinions on what they felt were the most important issues in America. A really silly idea to begin with, but Carter was a man with that kind of worldview.
Anyway, Art Buchwald in his parody had Carter knock on a door in rural America and ask: “Hello, I’m Jimmy Carter, what is the most important problem facing America today?” The answers were something like: “getting my kids ready and out the door for the school bus on time every morning,” and “lack of sleep because of the dogs howling all night in our back yard.” It was about “me.”
This year “me” means “my pocketbook” and “my financial future.” And, people are rightfully scared. Most of us haven’t faced this in our lifetime.
It is in this context that I point back at V. O. Key, Jr. His admonition that “voters are not fools” was based on his unshakable belief that if voters were not answering the political class’s questions correctly (meaning that they thought that the voters were dumb and not voting the way the elites thought they ought to), then it was Key’s view that this was because the politicians were not asking the right questions rather than the voters were giving the wrong answers.
We voters are not fools. We tend to know what we like and what we do not like. We know when the country is not working for us individually, and given the choices we face in candidates, we usually show what we want at the ballot box.
Republicans lost the public confidence in the last two elections because they forgot what they were sent there to do. It may now be the Democrats turn to learn this lesson. And, if that turns out to be true, we’ll have to see if the Republicans have learned anything from their recent defeat.
In ancient Rome, there was a tradition when a general returned in triumph from a military victory to have him ride through the streets of Rome in “The Triumphal March” at the head of his troops, the conquered in chains, and the rewards of his conquest. The Romans were very wise to have a slave ride behind him in his chariot to remind him (by whispering “remember, you are mortal”), that even though the crowd was cheering him and viewing him as a demi-god, he was still a mortal human being.
The coming political victors would be well served to remember this, too.
