Getting Out the Vote

[cbayer]

My father wrties a column for the San Gabriel Valley Tribune in California. I can't provide a link yet, but here is this week's column.

GETTING OUT THE VOTE

I suppose the safest thing for a columnist to say the week before an important election is, “be sure to vote.” If the pundit is really safe he/she will add, “It doesn’t matter how you vote, the important thing is that you do.” If there is safety in that admonition, there is also wisdom. Most often we are governed by a small minority of our citizens. We have come a long way from the landowners-only voting system, which the nation’s founders instituted. Perhaps the civil rights struggle of a generation ago was the last brick placed in the theoretical wall of democracy. But that has not meant we are thrilled with the reality.

In Australia, citizenship has certain legal requirements. Among them is the obligation to vote. You can place a blank, “donkey” ballot in the box, but your ballot must show up. If not, you are fined. In the US, we have the obligation to pay taxes and go to school. That just comes with citizenship. Why shouldn’t voting also be an obligation? Since it is not, those who don’t vote have little cause either to complain or to gloat about the results.

Nevertheless, the percentage of America’s eligible voters who get to the polls is abysmal. In the last off-year election (2006) only 37.1% of us managed to cast a ballot. If a bit more than half of us supported the winning candidates that means about 20% of the electorate decided on who would be the government’s leaders. In the last Presidential election (2008) 56.89% of us voted, and that was the highest percentage in 40 years. So about 26% managed to prevail.

This year we even have the obscene phenomenon of a candidate for the Governorship of California, who hardly ever bothered to vote, but believes she can win simply by pouring over a hundred and forty two million dollars of her own money into the effort. She wasn’t even registered until 2002, and may not have voted more than once even after that. So much for a commitment to democracy.

In 2008, millions of new voters generated a surprising national victory. But what has happened this year to these mostly younger people? Chances are that by next Tuesday evening we will observe that many of them have faded back into the political obscurity from which they came two years ago. One wonders what has become of their hopes.

This time around, the energized constituencies seem to be composed of the angry, whose bitterness has been fed by a political agenda that is without a clue as how we might solve the issues generated by the anger.

It would be the height of hypocrisy for me to suggest that it didn’t matter how you voted, just as long as you did. America is nearing a crossroads. Either we will revert to a social philosophy, ala Ayn Rand, which assumes that we are only self-sufficient individuals with no responsibility for the common good, or the opposite genius will survive. The American struggle to obtain liberty and justice for all has been built on the backs of a people who cherish the commitment we have to each other and to the common good. The division between rich and poor continues to grow, and the voices wanting to reverse almost a century-long national project to “secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity,” are growing louder and more strident.

Maintaining tax cuts for the already affluent is the first step in insuring that the nation’s wealth will be increasingly in the hands of those who already control most of it. In order to make up for the deficit this perspective will create, the next step would mean gutting Social Security, Medicare, universal health insurance, Aid to Dependent Children, funds for education and the other avenues guaranteeing no more than a modicum of universal justice. The American people are better than that—much better. To assume that this election will not move us along that downward path is to bury one’s head in the sand. Getting out and voting is important. But the critical question centers on how you view the history and nature of this great Republic. Your read on that question will probably determine how you vote.

But that’s just my opinion.

Charles Bayer

[oswaldactedalone]

1. knr

for a message that can't be repeated often enough.