Some Advice on Election Day
By the time you read this, election day will be in full swing. We probably won't have any sense of the outcome until late evening, if that, but everyone will be talking about it nonetheless. So far I've resisted making any predictions, and I don't plan on doing so now. There are a lot of things I feel I can discuss intelligently, but this just isn't one of them. I'm not a pollster, and I haven't lived through enough of these elections to trust my own intuitions. The truth is I have no idea what is going to happen tomorrow. I'm fairly confident the GOP isn't going to pick up seats in either house, but short of that, who really knows.
Some are predicting a huge Democratic victory. If that happens, I'll be ecstatic and I confess that I'll derive considerable satisfaction from watching the inevitable Republican in-fighting and finger-pointing that is sure to follow.
But if the Democrats fail to meet expectations tomorrow, which I consider at least as likely an outcome as anything else, please don't allow the inevitable disappointment and frustration to overwhelm you. At the risk of descending into cliche, don't allow yourself to succumb to the kind of cynicism and helplessness that leads so many people stop paying attention to politics altogether. If you do that, you will only empower and encourage the Karl Roves and Ken Mehlmans of the world.
As I mentioned the other day, the modern Republican party has significant built-in limitations. It is a party that lacks a coherent governing philosophy, a party that operates, more often than not, with an almost faith-based disregard for empirical data, and a party that appears endemically incapable of approaching problems and analyzing policy in a non-ideological way. You just can't govern like that for long. It's a recipe for failure. To borrow a phrase from Al Gore, "at some point, reality has its day."
If the Republican Party doesn't get its comeupance in this election cycle, it will eventually--rest assured. It would be nice, of course, if things didn't have to get a lot worse before they get better. But if the Republicans manage to maintain control of both houses after tomorrow, take some comfort in the knowledge that it will represent little more than a temporary postponement of a collapse that is all but inevitable.
Some are predicting a huge Democratic victory. If that happens, I'll be ecstatic and I confess that I'll derive considerable satisfaction from watching the inevitable Republican in-fighting and finger-pointing that is sure to follow.
But if the Democrats fail to meet expectations tomorrow, which I consider at least as likely an outcome as anything else, please don't allow the inevitable disappointment and frustration to overwhelm you. At the risk of descending into cliche, don't allow yourself to succumb to the kind of cynicism and helplessness that leads so many people stop paying attention to politics altogether. If you do that, you will only empower and encourage the Karl Roves and Ken Mehlmans of the world.
As I mentioned the other day, the modern Republican party has significant built-in limitations. It is a party that lacks a coherent governing philosophy, a party that operates, more often than not, with an almost faith-based disregard for empirical data, and a party that appears endemically incapable of approaching problems and analyzing policy in a non-ideological way. You just can't govern like that for long. It's a recipe for failure. To borrow a phrase from Al Gore, "at some point, reality has its day."
If the Republican Party doesn't get its comeupance in this election cycle, it will eventually--rest assured. It would be nice, of course, if things didn't have to get a lot worse before they get better. But if the Republicans manage to maintain control of both houses after tomorrow, take some comfort in the knowledge that it will represent little more than a temporary postponement of a collapse that is all but inevitable.
posted by A.L. at 12:21 AM
2 Comments:
Some perspective on a potential Dem victory today. If they do win, the Dems victory can be attributed in no small measure to the fact that many republican-like Dems are running for office. Webb in Virginia, for instance, is a former Reagan official. Harold Ford in Tennessee is about as conservative a democrat as there is, even on hot-button issues like gun control. Bob Casey in Pennsylvania is notably anti-abortion. The more conservative Democrat -- Lieberman -- is on his way to victory in Connecticut.
I think a Dem victory -- unless it is a smashing 50-vote swing in the house, and 55-45 Dems in the majority vote in the Senate, will be a triumph for the moderate/conservative wing of the Democratic Party. SOmething to consider in the ideology war with conservatives.
I know where you are coming from Anonymous Liberal, but you know how hard it is to keep going when you see all you have ever loved about your country being perverted and destroyed. You know, I always felt patriotism was for chumps, mainly, I think, because of the way I always saw it being abused, but it was not until I realy saw my patrimony in danger of destruction that I knew I was just as patriotic as the next guy. And it was not until Bush started his bloody push towards fascism that I really and truly thought my country was in danger.
Still and all I will vote. It is the very least any of us can do, and still millions of eligible voters will star home. At the end of the day, when I wake up and look out the window and no longer recognize the country I am living in as the one I was born in, it will be them I blame the most. May god have mercy on their cowardly souls.
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