Election Night in America

I'm watching election coverage along with everyone else in America, well, except for those folks watching Bridezilla re-runs, and those who are Netflixing. Currently we are flipping between CNN, Fox, and PBS.  CNN gets the coverage edge because I'm enthralled with the 'smart board'.  I wonder how many hours John King had to practice to be able to manipulate those giant touch and spread multi-screens.  I also wonder who wrote the computer program that runs it.  We do have a fascination with the Presidential race.   The irony is your County Commissioner race has more impact on your daily life.  The County Commissioner gets our potholes fixed, allocates the county's money, and solves those niggling local problems that make steam come out of our ears.  

I do know I'm very grateful I'm not living in a 'battleground', 'swing', 'decisive' state.  From what I've been able to glean, it's been non-stop TV and radio commercials in those states thanks to the influx of soft money OKed by a wrong headed Supreme Court decision.  I think if I'd been subjected to non-stop negative political ads, I would have checked NEITHER on the ballot, and sent each campaign a bill for my earplugs.  The dollar amount spent on political campaigns for Congress and the White House is going to top $4 BILLION dollars.  How obscene and shameful that number is in these hard economic times, and in light of the natural disaster in the Northeast.   It seems that the Senate is going to stay Democratic and the House of Representatives is going to stay Republican.  Whichever Presidential candidate wins doesn't really matter.  Hello, four more years of gridlocked do nothing government.  What did $4 billion dollars buy? 

I've also been thinking of past elections.  The first one I remember is 1960; I was 10 years old.  Some of you can remember the excitement when John Kennedy was elected. My 10 year old Oklahoma self thought he talked funny but had great hair.  Only after studying American history did I learn that the Chicago mayor cooked crucial Cook County ballot boxes which swung Illinois and thus the election to Kennedy.  Nixon decided not to contest those Chicago results because he thought it would be too divisive for the country.  Doesn't that seem like a quaint idea in these election litigation times?  Think about what happens in American history if Nixon wins the 1960 election.  I'd like to peek at the past 50 years' of American history in an alternate universe where the 1960 election went to Nixon.

I think one of the surprises this year was the lack of a serious or even semi-serious third party candidate.  Speaking of Richard Nixon, he adopted the George Wallace (third party candidate) southern strategy and turned the South which had been voting Democratic since the Civil War into Republican territory.  The left wing of the Democratic party still contends the 5% of the vote Ralph Nader got in Florida in 2000 defeated Al Gore.  What generally happens in American politics is that 'good ideas' of third party candidates are co-opted by either the Democrats or Republicans.  One famous example of co-opting an idea is Social Security.  This was a Eugene V Debs idea that Franklin Roosevelt picked up.  (Debs was a labor leader, the founder of the American Socialist Party and got 6%, a million votes, running for President while he was in prison for opposing World War I.)  The most recent third party candidate who influenced policy is Ross Perot with his magic markers and cardboard charts explaining the deficit to the American public.  The winner of that election?  Bill Clinton who became a deficit hawk and balanced the budget.

As I sit here watching returns, one thing is abundantly clear:  We are a divided people.  Half of us are positive the other half is wrong.  We've been stuck here for twelve years now.  In these past twelve years, the losers have been all of us in the middle.  A key in American politics for over 200 years has been compromise.  The government of this country was intentionally structured to foster compromise.  Today in Congress compromise is not just a dirty word or an unpopular idea; it's dead and buried.  If you shear off 15% of the right wing politicos and 15% of the left wing politicos, there isn't a dime's worth of political differences between the rest of us.  I just don't understand why 60% of us are being disenfranchised by the extremist kooks on BOTH ends of the spectrum.  They've got Congress completely stopped in its tracks.  Where are the politicians who understand and practice statesmanship?  They are being held hostage by threats and intimidation.  Get out of line and suggest or endorse a compromise to achieve solutions, and outside money will miraculously appear to defeat you in your next election.  Sigh.  I guess it's time to wait for 2014 and hope we can break the gridlock in THAT election.  I wonder how much money will be spent to make sure we stay gridlocked.  That certainly seems to be the result of the flood of political money washing over this entire country.