Election’s Over – Group Hug or Fight Harder?

November 4, 2004 by · 1 Comment
Filed under: Current Affairs 

I’m worried.

The election is over. I voted for Kerry. I suppose that I could consider my vote wasted, but my state was actually won by Kerry so that really isn’t true. One of the major reasons that I voted for Kerry was a lack of trust in Bush and Bush’s role as a divider rather than a uniter (maybe that’s two reasons).

What we’ve been left with is a polarized country. This election caused such divisions that people were defacing election signs, Kindergarten teachers were telling their charges how their parents should vote, and families and co-workers were having heated arguments. I remember the 2000 election, and the talk wasn’t about which candidate was evil – it was about which candidate was better (or worse, for those who took the “lesser of two evils” tack). Nobody called either candidate a fascist dictator. This year, things were just plain ugly.

This year’s campaigns were about fear. On the Republican side – fear of terrorism and fear of non-conformists (led by non-Christians and gays). On the Democratic side – fear of unemployment and fear of a military quagmire. I watched all 4 Presidential and VP debates – the candidates spent most of their time talking about how terrible the other guy is rather than how good they are or what they will do.

This fear and attack attitude spread into the general populace. I had family members telling me how bad Kerry was and how a vote for Kerry would cause terrorists to attack. In the blogverse, it was even worse. The right-wing and left-wing went at each other day and night (often depriving themselves of sleep to comment) and used each other’s words to fire up their own side. The right saw the left as “moonbats” in need of medication. The left saw the right as fascists trying to re-create the Nazi party.

The election itself came right down to the wire – 68,000 voters in Ohio. It could easily have been 500 voters in Florida again, or 10,000 voters in Missouri. What some right-wingers are calling a “mandate” was really only a 51-48 popular vote, and a narrow electoral win.

So the big question is:

Can we come together again?

For a short while after 9/11, the country came together united. We all flew our flags. We all gave money ($1 Billion in a week!) to support the victims. I even saw it on the road in increased courtesy by drivers. For a short time, we were united as a country.

The war in Afghanistan was supported by most of the country – only the staunchest anti-war people were opposed. This was a response to an attack on US soil and very few questioned it.

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Enter the US Presidential campaign. The Democratic primary process was, in a word, goofy. The Democrats ended up choosing the candidate least offensive to the most people – not the best but the most acceptable to the hard-core party activists. Rather than having candidates drop out as a single leader emerged, we had candidates whittled away as they made errors on the campaign trail (some quite bizarre). On the Republican side, Bush was a no-brainer as the incumbent.

The campaign took a major swing into the mud pit. The Bush campaign repeated their assertion that a vote for Kerry was a request for terrorists to attack the US again. The Kerry campaign asserted that a vote for Bush was a choice to kill US soldiers in Iraq. It got particular bad towards the end where each campaign started making up their opponents’ position – Bush claiming that Kerry was pro-gay and Kerry claiming that Bush would bring back the draft.

I spent the day and evening of Election Day hanging out at the Command Post chat room. I had expected the room to be a source of news – where each of us posted news that we found locally or nationally about the election in order to stay informed. Instead, I found the sewer of name-calling that the campaign itself had been. The Command Post readership is primarily right-wing, but the name-calling came from both sides in equal measure from each participant. Not all of the chatters were nasty, but the nasty ones more than made up for that and 75-90% of the traffic was worthless.

The election ended in a heap or tired, mangled American psyches. All of us have one heck of an election hangover.

The question remains – where do we go from here? In his concession speech, Kerry stated that it is time for America to come back together again. Bush asked Kerry supporters for their backing of his aims (though those aims are unacceptable to Kerry supporters). The only question in my mind is – do they mean it?

I fear that they do not. I can’t see any reason for Bush to reach out to Democrats or even Republican moderates. There just isn’t any incentive, and there is plenty of incentive for the Religious Right to grip the party more tightly than they do now. On the Democratic side, the party is in disarray. There’s just so much infighting that the Democrats can’t even work together to take back the White House. Elements of the Democrats seemed to be setting themselves up to win the NEXT election in 2008 (against someone other than Bush, and probably not Cheney either) rather than winning this one.

On the street, there isn’t any incentive to change either. It takes a big change to shake someone’s thinking processes. 9/11 provided that push, and the country showed it. Iraq provided that push again, and the country entered the division that we see today. I don’t see what is going to shake us out of that mode.

I truly feel that the division will remain until there is a flashpoint. I think we’re headed for a repeat of the late 60’s here without the drugs. If the anti-war people and the people concerned about unemployment and underemployment ever manage to link up, they can be a major force in American life (not just politics – life).

I hope I’m wrong, but I fear that I’m right. We’re not going to be united any time soon.

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