Election Overload

Finally, two days before Election Day, after months and months of news coverage, of political speeches, of news “bites” recycled over and over, of ambushes and sorties and accusations that verge on the ridiculous, as exemplified in particular by the PAC ads running in Ohio during the last week. We’ve had attack heaped on attack, with politicians earnestly exhorting the public to “read my plan” while offering precious few details a la Romney’s budget, and we’ve had endless political punditry that has left me more disillusioned precisely because it seems to concentrate, as always, on style rather than substance. It is hard not to compare this campaign to the recent hurricane Sandy that devastated the East Coast last week. Both have been incredibly destructive forces that have swept everything away in their sights, that have terrorized the population of that region and that will leave a legacy of finger-pointing as we reflect on the work that will be done to repair all the damage. And as with all natural disasters, we have the inevitability of the next one that is coming down the line.

I would like to believe that there used to be a time when campaign season was more joyous and innocent, when politicians weren’t beholding to fundraisers and political campaign contributions, when earnest people were willing to represent their communities with a spirit of moderation. Was it ever the case? When did we devolve into this madness we see every four years, a grinding process that tears away at us inside and that leaves us more dispirited than we ever were? Why do we lament over and over the way we have been consumed by partisanship, manipulated as we are by agents that claim to represent us but are instead representing their own interests? Is it only that these agents are freer now to reveal themselves and to shower their cash without restraint or oversight? Why has this election season alarmed me as never before?

It isn’t enough to the gridlock on Capital Hill. I can’t hear another ridiculous accusation by extremists firebrands such Michelle Bachmann or social conservatives such as the Missouri Senate candidate who earnestly proclaimed the idea of “legitimate rape” without wondering how they haven’t been hounded out of politics by reasonable people. The extremists are feeling freer than ever to proclaim their messages, doing so with a messianic zeal that seduces so many who are taken in by the proclamation of conviction rather than by the thoughtful consideration of the ideas. That is precisely what we are seeing as well with the political attack ads, and the way they formulate new and emotionally-appealing attacks that have no foundation in truth and that instead rely on distortion.

Nowadays, I have this strong sense that our political parties don’t represent my interests. They resort to the same formulas we’ve seen earlier, but delivered in wittier fashion and with a sense of urgency that seeks to bypass reason. For decades the Republicans have been relying on a standard attack on “Big Government”, while at the same time hypocritically increasing expenditures and yoking it to an invasive program of social conservatism that threatens to control how we conduct our lives at home. It is a deadly attack, and the Democrats never seem able to mount a convincing counterattack. They look muddled in response, reasonable, using charts and figures to counteract this attack when it is rhetoric and not charts that win the day. Neither party addresses the full panoply of concerns that I have, because they are limited to reprise this cycle of attack and counter-attack, in the mode of “Spy versus Spy” in the old Mad magazine serial.

Instead of a profuse Baroque symphony we have instead the same insistent notes jabbed over and over and over again. The claim is made that we are experiencing a crisis that threatens to overwhelm us unless we take dramatic action now. It all depends on scaring us, and of invoking what would seem to be our deepest fears. Who can live under the suffocating mantle of crisis? Is it not a mind scheme that is designed to alarm and provoke us into mindless action? Will we not always regret these actions taken in haste and without thoughtful consideration as we do the crash after a night of binge drinking? It is a form of intoxication that weaves the fumes of fear and propels us into the darkness with a lamp, and it is one that is used by both parties, although much more insistently and expertly by the Republicans. It has become, after all, their mainstay.

I refuse to be considered as just another mobile soldier to be rushed to the front. Everyone is appealing to me to save the day, to get out and make a difference, to fight for the future, and for any number of other clichés. We are in crisis, and we have to put up with what seems to be a never-ending barrage of ads and soundbites and rhetorical flourishes that suck the oxygen from our air and poison us against each other. I have political views and values, but I hate to be so blatantly manipulated.

My values are progressive, but I have a practical streak. I don’t appreciate this blind partisanship, and I don’t want conservative sectors to impose their rigid social values on me. It is hard enough to escape the confines of religious custom and that scheme of fundamentalism that purports to be based on true values that, in Mike Huckabee’s repressive phrase, stand “The test of fire”. I can’t believe in such a diety, for what is hell but another rhetorical excess? Are things so stark that we can only imagine this opposition between black and white, between pure good and pure evil? Why does this puritanical religious fundamentalism seem to pervade our politics more and more, yoked as it is with an anti-science bias as seen in the Republican agenda that wishes to inveigh against evolution and climate-change?

We knew it was going to be a bruising fight before the beginning of this campaign season. It seems as if the previous campaign season had not ended before we were gearing up for a new tsunami of attacks, and perhaps that is what it means to live in this current political climate. The election season is never over, and as with house races where representatives spend more time fundraising and working to hold on to their seats than they do crafting policies, we are constrained by our voracious election cycles.

We knew enough to expect tactics similar to the scurrilous “Swift-Boat” attack shamelessly pioneered by political operative Karl Rove eight years ago. We knew that PACs would have a more prominent role than ever, for they were unleashed by the “Citizen’s United” Supreme Court decision as a seeming reaffirmation of free speech protections. To have eliminated those restrictions to unregulated contributions by corporations was to create the conditions for the exhausting and hyperbolic campaign we have just witnessed, where by one report over six billion will have been spent.

So, in these last two days, after what seems like a decade of campaigning, with both sides still delivering nonstop attacks, I can’t help but miss what I would like to believe were the more placid campaigns of the past. I was a child during the Watergate years, and I don’t really have a sense of how gut-wrenching an experience that might have been to adults during that era, except by recalling the Iran-Contra hearings that took place during the last year of Reagan’s presidency. Was it similar in overall impact? Probably not. I have heard again and again in interviews with politicians from the 70s and 80s about how there used to be a different culture in Congress. They used to be able to set aside ideological baggage to adopt a more practical and reasoned approach. Perhaps it is just me expressing my cynicism by refusing to believe in this fallacy of a golden age although I very much want to believe in it. Perhaps twenty years down the line we will have House representatives sponsored by Exxon or Koch Industries or Walmart and we will look back on this season with wistfulness.

I fear a Romney win. I fear it, because I believe it would affirm the fundamentalism of the extremist conservative forces that are beholden to corporate interests, those who would like to appeal to the defense of meritocracy when all we have seen with them is that they are just as capable of ruinous policies and failure as another other group. They were behind the banking crash of 2008. They are behind the outsourcing of jobs, and environmental cataclysms, and yet, when those executives fail, they are prosecuted, they leave with golden parachutes that take the form of multi-million dollar payouts.

These extremist ideologists continually appeal to fear, and it is shameful to say it, have struck an echoing chord among white working classes who are willing to believe their message that they would fear the control of elites while hypocritically deflecting any attention to themselves. These forces have also highjacked the Democratic party apparatus as well, and that is what worries me, that I have no viable political options, and that I am left to vote for the lesser of two evils.

The election will soon be over, and we won’t have this barrage of coverage on the news channels anymore. It will blissfully come to an end, even if only for a nanosecond, a brief pause before we gear up for the next election cycle that looms on the horizon like a troubling storm. Although the overall problems and concerns will continue to demand solutions, at least we will be spared and left to try to survey and clean up the damage, and maybe, just maybe, to restore power and enjoy a little brief flash of light. I just want this cycle of endless campaigns to end.  We are not in a crisis, but we do have problems, and I at least wish to be demobilized from this need to partake in an endless political campaign season.



Eternal Observer -- ORomero (c) 2013
Copyrights ORomero 2013