By Martha Quillen
On election night, I heaved a huge sigh of relief. Obama isn’t as liberal as I’d like, but Romney and Ryan scare me. Likewise, Obama apparently scares lots of Republicans.
After Obama won, white students at Ole Miss rioted, and Twitter came alive with laments. “I’m mad as hell,” one Twit proclaimed. Oh, sorry, I guess that’s Tweet.
Another said “I feel like my best friend has died. Another proclaimed, “You people are voting against the whole country.”
Donald Trump called Obama’s victory a “total sham and a travesty.” Ann Coulter said the country is no longer interested in conservative ideas: “It is interested in handouts.”
Of course, the other side was jubilant. “Wow! Wow! Wow!” one Obama fan opined. Several said “Thank you, America.” Another simply Tweeted: “Whew!!!”
In Salida, election night celebrants cheered, but the overall reaction was mixed. “Now, things are going to keep getting worse and worse,” several Salidans told me. “It’s over,” a Republican friend announced. “Democracy as we know it is over.”
I don’t really understand why they feel that way. Despite all of the birther nonsense, Obama is a wealthy, Christian lawyer with a loyal wife, respectable children, and a goofy looking dog. He wears three-piece suits, hasn’t pushed gun control nor pacifism, supports a health care plan based upon Romney’s Massachusetts model, and is as fiscally conservative as Bill Clinton.
If Obama were a Republican with the exact same record, I suspect Democrats would despise him for his position on Guantanamo, his prolonged operation in Afghanistan, his use of drones, and his willingness to adopt a health care plan without a public option.
When the election was over, Karl Rove refused to believe that Obama had won, and then he claimed that Obama had only succeeded “by suppressing the vote.” That’s an interesting accusation – considering that Republican officials were doing just that by eliminating early voting hours in Democratic precincts.
So presuming Rove truly loathes voter suppression – as all true blue and red patriots should – where was he when Republican governors were shutting down polling places in black communities?
What’s going on here? Is it a surfeit of bigotry? Or a surge of white supremacy?
Actually, I don’t think bigotry has much to do with it. Rove and other Republicans don’t hate Michael Steele, Bobby Jindal, or Marco Rubio. They hate the opposition.
And they’ve been coached to hate the opposition – just as we all have.
In the United States, participatory democracy is the heart and soul of our system, and information is its engine. But in recent years, we’ve turned politicking into a blood sport, exuberantly officiated by stars such as Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Glenn Beck, Ann Coulter, and Sarah Palin.
Gone is the decorum of the 1940s and 50s. Now, news is a huge industry, and it also inspires countless books: Culture of Corruption: Obama and His Team of Tax Cheats, Crooks and Cronies; No Higher Power: Obama’s War on Religious Freedom; Arguing with Idiots; Liberal Fascism; Demonic; The Enemy at Home; Hostile Takeover; Screwed! etc., etc., etc. …
And on the other side is Bush’s Brain; Boss Rove; The Fall of the House of Bush; Bushwhacked; The Lies of Sarah Palin; Koch Brothers Exposed; and Idiot America: How Stupidity Became a Virtue in the Land of the Free.
And some diatribes are neither left nor right: The Party Is Over: How Republicans Went Crazy, Democrats Became Useless, and the Middle Class Got Shafted; Bailout: An Inside Account of How Washington Abandoned Main Street While Rescuing Wall Street; The Myth of the Rational Voter; The Myth of the Muslim Tide …
I’ve got to admit that I liked some of those books. But perhaps a steady diet of this overwrought prose is more than our country can stand.
Citizens have long asserted that they are tired of all this mean-spirited politicking and polarization. But the beat goes on. For decades now, Americans have been declaring war on pretty much everything: communism, poverty, crime, Vietnam, drugs, terrorism, Iraq, Afghanistan, Islam, and even one another – whites, greens, rednecks, gays, chauvinists, women, immigrants, unionists …
We’ve become gluttons for disparagement. Although very few of us are good at taking it, we have become increasingly good at dishing it out – and we applaud the people who serve it: Don Imus, Ted Nugent, Michelle Malkin, Michelle Bachmann, Donald Trump …
But, is all of this fury warranted?
I started wondering about that after a recent Facebook exchange. My liberal co-horts were exchanging victory salutations regarding the Obama win when Dan, an intrepid local conservative, posted that he had lost all hope for his country because Obama’s spending was going to destroy us.
I pointed out that our President had gone into debt to fund a stimulus package that was meant to avert total economic collapse.
Whereupon Dan agreed that a stimulus package might have been a good idea, but he maintained that Obama had wasted all of the money. Consider Solyndra, he wrote.
And I did, and came to a startling conclusion. Yes, some of the Obama administration’s projects tanked (including several companies which made up a small percentage of an 80-billion-dollar clean technology program.) But when the economy collapsed both George W. Bush and Obama supported a massive stimulus. And it worked.
Yes, unemployment today hovers at 8%, but it was 25% during the Great Depression, and our non-farm unemployment rate actually reached 37% in 1933. Experts predicted a depression-style bust in 2008, but today, the unemployment rate is less than it was during the early Reagan years (which many Republicans look back at fondly).
As it turns out, the stimulus worked, and it was not a Republican solution nor a Democratic solution. It was a solution.
Yet if the Republicans had launched it, I’m pretty sure my guys would have reproached them for wasting taxpayer dollars on spurious business start-ups and oil companies.
Dan replied to my post, and I meant to answer him, but never did – because by then my post-election euphoria had worn off and I was beginning to lose hope, too.
Good governance isn’t easy – nor is it ever finished. The problems people face tend to recur.
Here in Chaffee County we have repeatedly struggled over water rights, ditches, land use, roads, schools, infrastructure, budgets and who should pay for everything. But such controversies are resolvable – if government agents are willing to consider the needs of their constituents and opponents (and also the consequences for citizens with limited financial resources and/or special needs).
Sometimes people just don’t want to compromise, though. They would rather stand on principle. Or secede from the union. Or go down fighting.
And that’s the way things have been for years. Right now in the wake of the election, America’s leaders sound reasonable, responsive, and ready to govern once again, but I suspect they’ll square off soon – since they are still playing in the same national arena.
Then I expect to see John Boehner, that spry old war horse, challenging Nancy Pelosi, who’s tougher than she looks. And in the wings? There’s a whole new generation of contenders.
Let the Games Begin.
My thanks to the U.S. Congress, for giving my late husband, who was a political humor columnist, so much inspiration; and to author Suzanne Collins for her ideas.
