Elections

In today’s Cincinnati Post, Ann McFeatters suggests that negative campaigning works because we let it work. She goes on to say:

Let's face it. We elect presidents based on our gut reaction to them as people, which we often get wrong. We think of Bush as a nice, amiable, good-neighbor type who is centered, has a good wife and isn't pretentious. It's easy to think of going bowling with Bush. We think of Kerry as aloof, patrician, hard to figure out, with a wealthy, complicated wife.

The truth is the two men are much the same. They went to Yale, are smart, warm, funny, ambitious, physical, shrewd, sophisticated, calculating, wealthy and used to having their own way. The rest of our image about each man has all the substance of cotton candy, the hype of multimillion-dollar spin machines.

Interesting perspective. I think there is a real difference between Bush and Kerry, but that, in my view, is mostly beside the point. McFeatters’s second sentence is the one that grabs me and won’t let go: “We elect presidents based on our gut reaction to them as people, which we often get wrong.” Read it again. We elect presidents “as people,” not as representatives of the people,
not as the embodiment of the principles and values we all share as Americans.

During our Revolution, there were no elections. Those who fought during our Revolution did not fight for democracy. They did not fight for a particular system of government because there wasn’t any. They fought for principles, they fought for values, they fought for liberty. So today I speak a heresy: that democracy may be the enemy of the true and the good. Now, I would quickly add that I don't know of a system that is the friend of the true and good, because it is in the nature of systems to serve themselves, and not the larger good. So, in a democracy, elections are about the system and who will control the system, and not about principles, not about liberty. Elections are an exercise in finding the highest fraction of the lowest common denominator.

One would think the democratic way would be to seek a fraction in which the whole was one. But each party begins with a fraction of the whole and then divides that up, and what is common to the whole is lost. I imagine that, on that long-ago field of battle, even the lowest private could speak of the principles he was fighting for–-and those principles were not self-interest. I believe that every election after that of George Washington--who accepted the role of president reluctantly, and understood that his title and personal power were always and only to be used in the service of the people--was more a travesty than an affirmation.

To expect elections to be about ideals is to be disillusioned. But to speak about ideals during an election is to look for connections and point toward the future. To speak about personalities and war and other transient issues is to look for division and get caught in the seductive web of the past.

Posted by Elissa Bishop-Becker at August 30, 2004 10:54 PM | TrackBack