It’s finally over. No more mail, no more commercials, no more arguments and no more phone calls.
Wednesday morning the sun rose just as it had the day before, leaving me with the feeling we had all been through some sort of temporary insanity, that only ends when the ballots are cast. It’s amazing how on Election Day, Tuesday, you feel the apocalypse is upon us, and on Wednesday, it immediately goes back to, “Ho hum, what’s for lunch?”
In January, a new man is going to raise his right hand and be sworn in as President of the United States and the Republic is going to go on as it has for 200-plus years. That doesn’t mean elections have no meaning, but what it does mean is the consequences are seldom as dire as the election rhetoric would have you believe. I think there are several reasons for this.
First and foremost, we are a conservative country. I don’t mean we are necessarily politically conservative. But we are conservative about radical change. We like our change to be incremental, and whenever someone proposes anything radically different, like the Gingrich Contract for America or the Clinton Health Care program, in general, the public tends to balk. This natural conservatism serves as a brake on both the President, whomever it might be, and the Congress.
Second, we have all sorts of sophisticated polling devices, that have now reached a level enabling us to poll daily, and we can monitor public reaction to just about anything as it happens. The impact of this is, as soon as anything begins to look like it’s unpopular, there are immediate pressures for course corrections to bring policy back toward a more middle course. Our definition of leadership is going to change. The question whether a political leader has the guts to do something that is short-term unpopular because that leader perceives it as a long-term good idea.
And third, there is so much baloney tossed around in a presidential campaign you could choke. For example, it’s clear we are going to have to do something about Social Security, and that’s not because of some big mistake. It’s actually the result of a good thing. We’re living longer. When Social Security started, people had the good grace to retire at 65 and then die at 68, the arithmetic worked. Now we retire at 65 and die at 88. Unless we intend to try and force younger generations into bondage, keeping a bunch of old-timers like us living in the style to which we’ve become accustomed, we’ve either got to raise the retirement age or up the contributions, or some other alternative.
It’s obvious, no matter who wins, it’s going to be a narrowly divided Congress. No president can just impose his will in that circumstance. He’s got to sit down and wheel and deal with the other party to get the votes he needs. Not infrequently, this puts him in conflict with his own party.
The bottom line is, when the campaign is in full swing, the candidates would have you believe anything is possible. Therefore, voting for the other guy is potentially apocalyptic. Once elected, the reality is, the choices are a great deal more limited than any politician would ever like to admit. They’re all as much a follower as a leader. Much as they would like to pretend otherwise, the mechanics of our system always pushes the president toward the center, primarily because that’s where most of the voters are located.
So, for those of you ready to slit your wrists because your guy lost, my advice to you is — don’t do it quite yet, because it may not be as bad as you think.