One For Every Occasion
All of us are blessed with gifts and abilities others envy. Athletic prowess, quick wit, social ease, chiseled abs, an orange bowling shirt from 1978 that still looks brand new.
I have been blessed with two such proficiencies. I can smell a cucumber hours after it’s been cut (more of an oddity really) and I am extremely capable at eavesdropping on the conversations of those around me, although my girlfriend would argue that the latter is not so much a gift as an annoying deficit of character.
But so it was that I found myself in a coffee house the other day, diligently re-writing Wikipedia entries about Teletubbies when my senses were piqued by two older ladies eating cucumber sides and talking about the impending gubernatorial election, a confluence of circumstances that couldn’t be ignored (Meg Whitman is responsible for opening the US market to the nightmare that is the Teletubbies).
Both were decidedly democrats. They didn’t like the Republican Whitman at all and were exchanging rumors they’d heard about Faustian deals she and a Henry Paulson-led Goldman-Sachs had entered into not so long ago. They spoke of how they couldn’t trust anyone who, after making the money Mighty Meg had, would run for public office. It all seemed too shady, too much of a Dick it-was-an-open-bidding-process-and-Haliburton-just-happened-to-win Cheney kind of situation.
But beyond that, they hated the tone of the debate. The dishonest attack ads and smear campaigns. They longed for a return to the politics and politicians of their youth.
“It’s just not how it used to be Doris.”
“What?”
“I said, it’s just not how it used to be!”
(Ok, my gift for subtle eavesdropping wasn’t really required this time around).
Newt Gingrich has made similar statements over the years, taking out contracts on America with the promise of a return to the Brigadoon of his idyllic childhood, with cherry pies and town hall dances for everyone. Turns out that for poor old Newt, that never really existed as his ex-wife helped point out (http://www.esquire.com/features/newt-gingrich-0910).
I started thinking, if it didn’t exist for Newt, did it ever really exist for these ladies or anyone else. Were these old bags just reminiscing with metaphorical rose colored glasses over their actual rose colored glasses? I decided to take a break from my wiki-editing to explore the electoral climate of their presumed youth.
After a lengthy mathematical deduction (not one of my gifts) I determined that if these women were indeed octogenarians, then they would have come into voting age around 1948. At the time, the governor of California was Earl Warren, who two years earlier had won re-election practically unopposed as the nominee for all three state parties (Republicans, Democrats, and the Progressives). Warren, to date the only three term governor of California (former governor and current candidate Jerry Brown would be the second and last eligible for this distinction since the 1990 passage of proposition 140 limits an office holder’s time to two terms, but was not grandfathered in), was a notable man in both state and national history.
After falling just shy of winning the election as Vice-President on the Dewey ticket of 1948, he was appointed Chief Justice of the Supreme Court by Ike Eisenhower in 1952. He had his hand in many important and ground-breaking decisions from that post, including Brown v. Board of Education, which desegregated public schools across the nation, and Miranda v. Arizona, which eventually accounted for twenty percent of all dialogue on network TV dramas. Later, he went on to chair the Warren Commission which sought to investigate the assassination of JFK. In each case, he sought unanimous or near unanimous support from his colleagues (which in the case of the Kennedy hearings, led to gaping holes in the findings and decades of conspiracy theories of a cover-up).
But throughout his career, Warren straddled party lines. He was a Republican with a fierce Liberal streak, and he was, on the whole, respected for it.
Now, on the surface, that may seem like an ideal political climate, one where politicians and civil servants aren’t mandated to consistently vote strictly along party lines. Where there is no self-proclaimed “party of no”. Where all options are on the table. One where a party’s candidate is nominated because they are most qualified, and not simply because of affiliation.
But that surface would be a scratchy one that would give you the kind of splinters and hives that ultimately lead to infection and death!
Take Delaware’s current Senate race. If everyone supported the more qualified candidate, we never would have had the pleasure of seeing Carl Rove’s impassioned defense of witch craft and masturbation abstinence?
If we supported leaders whose rhetoric was informed and mirrored our own convictions, how would we ever have known that a hockey mom is just a lipstick shade away from a dog?
And if we didn’t fuel endless partisan attacks, we wouldn’t have polls that show the same 20% of Americans who believe Obama is a Muslim just two years ago thought he was a radical Christian. These things are important!
I don’t know, maybe there was a better time in politics, a more truthful and united environment where the debate centered around different takes on the issues and not rhyming battle cries, illiterate signs and hoaki costumes. But I don’t think there was ever a time where casting a vote was so easy as it is right now, where the panderers and placaters are so obvious, and their fickle convictions like chains in a dominatrix strip club, one for every occasion.
