The Blog to Be Named Later returns with what was originally going to be an analysis of recent events in the presidential election. However, today the Blog takes a trip into the Twilight Zone, because that seems to be where the rest of the country has gone.
There may be no event more important than an American presidential election. It is a contest that determines who will lead the most powerful country the world has ever known. More than that, a presidential election decides the course the United States will take over the next four years. This affects not only the 300 million American citizens, it has an enormous impact upon the rest of the world, so entwined are we in economics, politics and diplomacy.
In 1860, Abraham Lincoln was elected president at the precise time he was needed. He was preceded and succeeded by a series of mediocre presidents, but at the moment of crisis, whether through divine intervention or sheer luck, we had President Lincoln.
In 1901, by an assassin’s bullet, Theodore Roosevelt became president and led America into the twentieth century. It was Roosevelt who defined the modern presidency and served notice that America was now a world power. His own landslide election in 1904 was not an important election because its outcome was a forgone conclusion, but he was the right man for his time.
In 1932, Franklin Roosevelt won his own landslide over Herbert Hoover, and began a twelve year administration which ended the Great Depression and set the course for victory in World War II. At the time, Roosevelt was called “the indispensable man”, and there is merit to the nickname. He was succeeded by a plainspoken farmer from Missouri who never attended college, who was elected to the Senate by a corrupt political machine, and who had served less than three months as vice president, all the while completely in the dark on matters of state. His name was Harry Truman. All he did was make the momentous decision to drop the bomb on Japan, win the war, save Europe from communism through the Marshall Plan, the Truman Doctrine and the Berlin Airlift, and prevent a police action in Korea from becoming World War III.
Still, for all of that, some elections are more important than others. In 1976, how much could it matter if Gerald Ford or Jimmy Carter won the presidency? America, and the world, would not be much different. The same is true for many elections in American history. But there are some elections that matter very much, and this year is one of them.
We live now in times just as challenging, if not more so, than what Harry Truman had to deal with. This makes the choice of the next president all the more important. Unfortunately, we also live in times when the people of the United States have lost their way. Politics has become poisoned by money and partisan bickering. Political campaigns, which in Lincoln’s time were great debates of public policy, are venues for character assassination and stupid, shallow remarks made in thirty second commercials. Think about that for a moment. The single greatest factor in the selection of choosing the President of the United States is now television. Not the presidential debates, though. Not in substantive appearances by the candidates on news programs. Not by a legitimate comparison of the candidates by legitimate news organizations. No, the way to move a poll these days is with a commercial, tucked in between advertisements for Taco Bell and Free Credit Report Dot Com. This is what the presidency means to us now? We pick presidents like choosing between Bud Light and Heineken? Consider this: if we choose our presidents on TV via advertising, aren’t we explicitly saying that the presidency is for sale?
There’s something wrong with this country. There’s something wrong when pollsters are asking voters which presidential candidate they’d like to have a beer with. Do you choose your doctor that way? If you found a lump on a part of your body that should be smooth, would you pick the surgeon who’s going to operate on you based on how outgoing he is? No! You want a wall full of diplomas. You want credentials, you want evidence that this guy knows what he’s doing, and you don’t care if the other guy is pretentious or snobby if he can save your life. Maybe you pick the guy with the most experience, or maybe you pick the guy with the steady hand and the new idea. But you make your choice for good reasons. Just not when you’re electing a president.
There’s something wrong with this country. There’s something wrong when people complain that they don’t know much about the most talked about, most thoroughly covered, most photographed and researched political candidate in American history. And when I hear that, you know what it says to me? It says that people are using that as an excuse not to vote for someone who looks different from what they are used to, who has a name that’s not like theirs. In 2003, conservative Louisiana narrowly elected a liberal Democrat named Kathleen Blanco governor of Louisiana. Why? Because her opponent, a very bright, able, qualified Republican, is an Indian-American named Piyush Jindal. The fact that he goes by “Bobby” evidently wasn’t enough for people. Jindal was leading in the polls, but on Election Day, curiously, while his numbers in metropolitan areas were solid, Blanco outpolled him in rural areas. So Blanco won the election, and two years later, during the worst natural disaster in American history, Louisiana had a governor who couldn’t form a coherent sentence and got what it deserved.
There’s something wrong with this country. There’s something wrong when we’ve turned out back on our own history. The American people used to make informed decisions. We used to read newspapers. We used to subscribe to magazines that contained thoughtful, substantive articles. We used to watch Walter Cronkite. We used to know what We were talking about.
We don’t anymore. 15% of the American public thinks Barack Obama is a Muslim. This after three months of controversy over comments made by his pastor at the TRINITY UNITED CHURCH OF CHRIST. On the second anniversary of 9/11, nearly 70% of Americans still believed that Saddam Hussein had a role in the attacks. This despite a complete lack of evidence tying him to Bin Laden and a wealth of evidence that Bin Laden viewed Hussein as a traitor to Islam and essentially worse than America.
69% of Americans can identify Dick Cheney as Vice President, a respectable number, until you think about it and realize that nearly ONE OUT OF THREE AMERICANS DON’T KNOW WHO THE VICE PRESIDENT IS!
How important is this election? It’s hard to say, because I just don’t know if this country can recover from the downward slide it has been in for some time. It started after World War II, and in many ways was inevitable. We had too much power. This is what happens when you rule the world; you rot from within. It happened to the Persian Empire. It happened to the Romans. It happened to the Spaniards, to the British, to the French. And now it’s happening to us. You become drunk on power, there are no more worlds to conquer, and you begin to decay. You begin to slip generationally. The baby boomers didn’t accomplish as much as the WWII Generation, and now Generation X is falling short of the boomers. And don’t even mention Generation Y.
Is there no solution to this decline? Sure there is. It’s called knowledge. It’s called perspective. It’s called awareness. An informed, engaged, enlightened public making sure that it remains so. That is the hallmark of a great nation. But we’re not informed, we’re stupid. We’re not engaged, because we can’t be bothered. And we’re damn sure not enlightened. Not in a country filled with people who allow themselves to be made to fear, well, just about everybody. Watch out, or “the terrorists” will get you. Be careful, or gay people will get married and pretty soon you’ll be gay too! Be on your guard, or that Muslim guy will become president, and we’ll all have to wear turbans.
Forty years ago today, Robert F. Kennedy was murdered in Los Angeles. His death changed how a lot of people felt about this country. After the deaths of John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King, in the midst of the agony of Vietnam and race riots, Bobby Kennedy was the last great hope of that generation. Now, for the first time in four decades, there is another politician who has that kind of potential. The question is, do the people still have it as well?
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