Election Day

Election Day should be a showplace for America democracy, the end of long political campaigns during which each candidate makes their best pitch to the voters then retires to campaign headquarters to await the results of the vote count.   Winners thank their constituents and promise to represent all citizens.   Losers hold out as long as they can then thank their supporters and grudgingly concede.  Some promises are kept, some forgotten … and we find out if our choices were good ones, always knowing that in two years, we get to choose again.  Democracy goes on.   That’s how it should be.  How it used to be when being a democracy was more important than partisan politics.

The world sees a different picture today.  Politicians warn of election fraud before the voting even starts, and it is absolutely certain that by the time the votes are counted, some politicians will claim they didn’t lose, that the election was stolen.  Shouldn’t expressing total distrust in the democratic process disqualify one from holding office in a democracy?   If I read the news this morning, I can find reports of how many election deniers and followers of the nonsense known as Q-Anon have been elected to office, joining crackpots like Marjorie Taylor Green and Lauren Bobbert as disruptors rather than guardians of democracy.  It is only by the thinnest of margins that a doctor turned snake-oil salesman turned wanna-be politician didn’t further infect our government.  All across the country election deniers are winning elections and it is still possible that we will see a man whose only qualification is that he was a great running back elected to the Senate.

Still, today, I not over-joyed but I am relieved.  The so-called Red Wave turned out to be a red ripple and it remains a possibility that Democrats will still control the Senate.  As a moderate who is a registered Democrat but has voted Republican as often as Democratic, I have always preferred a divided government to prevent the right-most and left-most extremes of our political parties from running ideologically wild.   I would hope that a divided government would encourage compromise but given that the Republican’s agenda seems to be revenge and the Democrats seem mesmerized by the possible prosecution of The Donald, paralysis is more likely, especially with the sort of poison Donald Trump and his cohorts throw into the mix on a daily basis.   But I was wrong about Election day, so maybe enough of our leaders will remember that they are elected to serve our citizenry, not their own egos or their party, to make some progress.   I am a little bit hopeful … which is a lot better than I expected to feel this morning.  God bless America.

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Tags: elections, perspectives, politics

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