Are You Like Me?
Five weeks left in this year's midterm election campaigning and I can't wait for it to be over. I'm beyond disgusted, I'm bored with it all!
The two major parties have perfected their pitches to an ever-dwindling cadre of partisans with little thought to expanding their bases, appealing to independents, or trying to win over people from the opposition camp. Energizing your base, they call it. Karl Rove is a disciple of this approach. Practiced by both the Republicans and the Democrats, it makes me sick!
It's all about getting "our team" on top. To what end? So that we can keep "our team" on top. It's politics reduced to something like betting on the Super Bowl. And, sadly, it seems to be effective.
This sort of campaigning has little or no regard for principle. Even rank-and-file partisans have bought into the approach. Proof? A new Marist Poll shows that Rudy Giuliani is the most popular of contenders for the 2008 GOP presidential nomination among ordinary Republicans. Rudy Giuliani? Ultraliberal Rudy Giuliani? Yep. Why? Because people think he can win. "Hooray for our team!" they say. (Meanwhile, the rank and file disdain John McCain, the third most conservative member of the US Senate, a guy more hawkish on the war in Iraq than President Bush or Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld.)
Mind you, I'm not commenting on whether Giuliani (or McCain) should be the Republican nominee. Others can opine on that. (I've almost gotten to the point where I don't care anyway.) It's just that Giuliani's popularity demonstrates how much more partisanship is about winning than it is about his party's supposed principles.
To some extent, I suppose, this--this partisan pliance for the sake of winning--has always been around. Huey Long, the Louisiana dictator whose life and politics were turned into a novel by Robert Penn Warren, used to excoriate the Democrats and Republicans. Each were offering political snake oil, he asserted: one offered high populorum, the other low popuhirum.
I'm not saying that there aren't real differences between the two parties. There are. (Nor do they have to be philosophically pure; I believe in the big tent. But, even in the big tent, there should be some broad common understanding of principles beyond a common commitment to winning at all costs.)
Savage personal assaults that pass for political campaigning, untrue and misleading caricatures of opponents, don't reflect those real differences or help us decide who best can govern.
I've been a political junkie all my life. But not any more. I'm disgusted and I'm bored. If the politicians have managed to turn someone like me off, imagine what they've long ago done to people with more sense than me!
A bored, repulsed electorate is certainly unlikely to keep our Constitutional system going. If we lose that, we lose America. And if that happens, history will show that we were destroyed not by terrorists, but by thirty-second "contrast" ads.
[Cross-posted at RedBlueChristian.com.]
[Thanks to Rick Moore for linking to this post!]