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There are times when I feel like I’m painting the
picture of Dorian Gray, but in reverse: What I write stays the same
while the world keeps changing. The feeling is always strongest the
first Monday of November.
My deadline is Monday morning at 9:00 a.m., whether or
not I have anything to say that anyone might want to read. By
Tuesday, people will care about little but the election. By
Wednesday, the earliest this will be printed, all the polls,
pundits, charges, and counter-charges will be meaningless. On
Wednesday it will be all over but the shouting.
Of which I hope there will be precious little, though
I’m not holding my breath. The polls show tight races in several
states, close enough to tilt the race one way or the other depending
on how atrocious the ever-present “margin of error” turns out to
be. Armies of lawyers that likely outnumber the insurgent forces in
Fallujah are poised to slam their ham-fisted thumbs on the scales,
abusing their magnificent (and often taxpayer funded) legal
educations to hijack the electoral process.
It is my fondest desire that readers everywhere are
pounding this column on their kitchen tables, shouting “Hah! Got
that wrong, pal!”
I hope no one is looking back at the 2000 Florida
election ruckus as “the good old days.”
I hope no one wishes politicians would just settle their
differences by dueling like Alexander Hamilton and Aaron Burr and
spare the rest of us the pain.
It has become conventional wisdom that this is the most
important election of our time and that Americans are more divided
than ever. This election is (or was, as you read this) vitally
important and the divisions are sharp. But all presidential
elections are critical, we just don’t always know it on Election Day
because we can’t predict what the person we elect will face.
We should vote as if every president will have a
September 11 because every president might. And the notion that we
are more divided than ever is simply wrong. As nasty as it’s been I
doubt we’re on the verge of a second Civil War. We haven’t even had
a Vietnam War style street riot. The 2004 nominating conventions
looked nothing like the Democrat convention of 1968, which left
parts of Chicago in ruins.
Americans have not given a presidential candidate a
majority of the popular vote since 1988, and that guy couldn’t get
re-elected. That’s three in a row, which some point to as proof of
institutional hostility, a rift that won’t end in our lifetime.
I’m betting the streak ends this year, but if you’re
yelling “Wrong again, Nostradamus. Now it’s four,” it has happened
before. The elections of 1880, 1884, 1888, and 1892 all saw victors
with less than half the popular vote. Benjamin Harrison won the
electoral vote in 1888, becoming president despite pulling fewer
popular votes than Grover Cleveland. Cleveland retired Harrison the
next time around, but still with less than half the vote.
Important elections and a divided citizenry do not spell
doom. I’m not sure unity is even particularly important as long as
we settle our differences without riots or a shooting civil war.
The mark of a democracy is that people are allowed their
differences; if that leads to the occasional bout of disunity, so be
it.
Americans have generally come together when it counts,
as we did in World War I, World War II, and the months after
September 11. The biggest problem in 2004 is that we can’t seem to
agree on what counts. Whoever is president-elect when this prints,
I hope we figure it out before someone does it for us.
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