I just voted the straight democratic party--give Barack a solid team, is what I was thinking. I didn't vote on the local stuff, largely because I knew myself to be woefully uniformed. How does anyone do it? Just following and evaluating the national stuff has given me such a knot in my back that I had to go and lie down today.I closed up my half-completed ballot and mailed it in, feeling virtuous. For me, the campaign was over, or so I thought. I turned in the ballot at the post office and went to the diner. "Who are you voting for?" asked my favorite server. "Obama," I said. "You?"I'm just not sure." The owner left the bacon on the grill to fend for itself and came over to the counter. "Me, either," she said, propping her hip against the cash register. And so, as the bacon sizzled behind us and the sun sliced warm through the morning chill and old guys in John Deere "gimme" caps hunched over their coffee at the corner table, we talked speeches, the merits of experience versus a good team, temperament, honesty, fact-check sites--all the things I had so painfully worked out over the course of the campaign. I didn't ask how they intended to vote. There's a reason voting booths have curtains.And that's been it. On television the rallies lurch on. Across the nation, Sarah Palin and John McCain defend Joe the Plumber's tattered virtue, and the GOP's decision to spend $150,000 plus in campaign funds to help Sarah look prettier. I don't really care, except to be happy they spent the money on clothes rather than advertising or, God forbid, qualified strategists. They trot out the same tired rhetorical slams that we have heard a million times before, that were debunked long ago on the fact check sites, and that I am weary unto death of hearing. I wish it were over. And yet it's not. Now is crucial on the national stage. The campaign may be over for me, but all across America people are still deciding for whom they will vote. There's a reason for those rallies, for the coverage, for the endless campaigning. The pollsters' map still shows several critical undecided states. Obama's rhetoric has shifted; his speeches have become calls for reconciliation, responsibility, and hope, with quick summaries of his plans for achieving those things. McCain and Palin's rhetoric, on the other hand, is simply more of the same--and I do mean "more." They have stopped putting the "s" word in Joe the Plumber's mouth, and now say it out loud themselves: "Barack Obama is a Socialist." The internet shows flyers that have been appearing in places less settled in their opinions than we seem to be here: Scurrilous things. Obama is a Terrorist. Obama is "soft" on child abuse and rape. Obama is a Muslim--and not in a good way. Obama is lying to us all. Obama harbors a deep dark secret, one we know is terrible because otherwise, why wouldn't he tell us? The flyers aim to destroy one of Obama's strongest assets--his trustworthiness, his reliability. The flyers flirt with slander and libel; I am actually not certain but that some of them might be actionable. The old, discredited lines about Obama voting 94 times against lower taxes and raising taxes on those who make as little as $42,000 a year have reappeared. There is no plan.
Back in the beginning, Sarah Palin likened herself to a pit bull. The comparison is apt. The McCain/Palin campaign has not been about offering another option, but about bringing down and destroying Obama. It isn't about winning as much as it is about making sure Obama loses. And that, right there, is the key difference between the two campaigns. Obama has a vision, and a plan for achieving it. He tells us about it, carries us along. McCain/Palin seem to have no vision beyond walking into the Oval Office the morning after the election. McCain is about winning; Obama is about leading. It's been obvious to me for a long time. Clearly it is less obvious to the men in boots and thick jackets at Palin's rallies. They still shout, chant, and boo on command. In some places, the campaigns are still urgent, vital, pressing. But that's on the news. Here it is different. Here, it feels like Barack Obama is the president, and the the Sarah Palin Show, with John McCain, is struggling for enough ratings to make it to the end of the season. A few years back the soaps got into a ratings war. Suddenly the quietly seething little towns of Landview and Port Charles were infested with gangsters, ghosts, killers, and other dangerous, dramatic, ratings-boosting types. Characters from one soap appeared and disappeared on other soaps until afternoons turned into a single long, complex narrative. The same thing's happing to the Sarah Palin Show now. Sarah has now informed us that Barack Obama, who started out the season being portrayed as weak, young, and ineffectual, is Not What He Seems. His character is being developed in unsettling, ratings-boosting ways. Her script-writers have been laying the groundwork for declaring him a terrorist, a socialist, a Muslim, a closet totalitarian, an elitist, an intellectual, even--and I gasp to hear it--a Skilled Orator. Where will it end? There's no denying that the shows have a certain sick fascination, but they are not persuasive. A train wreck has a certain sick fascination, but I would not want the engineer at the front of my train. There's a sense that, struggle as they might, the show has simply run out of gas. Its characters do not resonate. I can't speak for everyone, but the lies, the portentious, pretentious, ugly lies, are getting to me. It's becoming a foregone conclusion that they will be cancelled at the end of the season. The speculation now is whether the rumored behind-closed-doors battles within the campaign will actually erupt into open warfare before or after the show is cancelled. It's over, and yet, it's not over. McCain has come back from worse, and there's that old saying about the gods protecting fools and children. We would be idiots to assume too much, too soon. That's how presidential campaigns are lost.Here, though, on our Main Street, life goes on. The trees are turning red, bronze, gold, and a yellow so bright it hurts your eyes to look at them. The man who lives in my house and builds and paints put in a new set of steps from my yard to the street. The sky is so blue and deep you could drown in it. We sit on our front porch in the mornings in thick socks, pajamas and jackets and sip Irish Cream coffee, and watch the steam drift across the lawn and mingle with the mists under the trees by the river. A few campaign signs still tilt crookedly in yards. They seem sad, like dirty glasses after a party, mints left over after a wedding.My son played in his very first band concert. He's in sixth grade now, and plays tuba. I was probably the only mother there who could actually identify which notes issued from her child's instrument. It's a small town, so the concert included selections from the sixth, seventh, and eighth-grade bands as well as the high school concert band and the middle school and high school jazz bands. Musical kids have to double up in our town. It's almost Halloween, and many kids wore costumes. Convicts, fairy princesses, skeletons, rock stars, clowns, and Jedi knights filled the stage. Barack Obama played the trumpet--very well, I might add--in the high school jazz band, but other than that the campaign was conspicuous only by its absence.Life is moving on here on Main Street--and yet, on other Main Streets, the battle continues. Word is that the verbal violence is translating into physical violence at the Sarah Palin shows. An Obama canvasser was beaten up the other day. A McCain volunteer showed up with a bruised and mutilated face, claiming to have been accosted by an enraged Obama supporter. The McCain camp seized on the story and trumpeted it nationwide. By the time the girl, who reported a history of instability, confessed that it was a hoax the story was everywhere, playing on the deepest, darkest, most racist fears of the conservative base. Tires are slashed at Obama rallies. McCain rally attendees spew hate at media filming them; for them, the media has become as much of an enemy as Obama, and that's saying something. A sense of entitlement has taken hold among some of the GOP faithful. When did they become the guardians of True America? Who anointed them the standard-bearers for all of us? What happened to freedom of speech, of religion, of choice? It would be easy to say that Sarah Palin is responsible, but while I think she's certainly fed those divisive, elitist attitudes, I don't think she gave them birth. I suspect that the roots stretch into fundamentalism--and in particular fundamentalist christianity. The GOP is powered by the conviction that their ideology is Ordained by God. Discuss any party plank, and it's not long before Bible quotes start flying. Believing that God has rubber-stamped you is a heady feeling. Ask anyone at the rallies. Ask the Inquisitors. Ask the witch burners. Ask the Conquistadores. Ask the Crusaders. Ask the Hebrews, slaughtering Canaan's inhabitants. Ask the Taliban. The election has become an arms race, with escalating rhetoric and propaganda on a level that appalls me. I am an Obama supporter, but I am also a literate person, trained in the use of words. I am glad to report that the Obama campaign has been a model of restraint compared to the opposition. True, Obama ads did refer to McCain's behavior just prior to the first rally as "erratic." McCain aides seized on this as "negative" advertising, but I didn't see it that way then, and I don't see it that way now. The simple fact is that McCain's behavior at that time--making and canceling plans, rushing off to Washington, canceling his debate, then uncancelling it, and all the while demanding that Barack Obama do the same--was "erratic." It's the right word to describe what was happening. Other words might have been used: "Lunatic," for instance. Unkind comparisons might have been drawn to beheaded chickens. But they weren't. There are lines that the Obama campaign has not crossed. Still, though, the fact checkers are reporting more errors creeping into the Democratic campaign's rhetoric.
The McCain, campaign, on the other hand, has traveled beyond stiff, spirited opposition into the land of Character Assassination, and very close if not past the borders of the lands of Slander and Libel. The down-ticket races are the same--full of nastiness and spin and the sort of politics that everyone says should be beneath us. My mother informs me that, based on her reading of the voter's pamphlet, the End Times are upon us. She shows me the relevant section; she's right. The candidate has taken two disparate laws, cobbled them together, added a touch of the Apocalypse, and neatly tied his opponent to the Antichrist. Such things should be beneath us, but they don't seem to be; ugly as they are, such things seem be an integral part of our system.But there's another part, too. There's the part where I stand in the diner and discuss national politics while bacon sizzles on the grill, and I hear us moving together beyond the old stereotypes and fears and ultimately choosing to cast a vote that would have been unthinkable when we were children. There's the part where a nice lady walks through my neighborhood to remind us all to get our ballots mailed in, and stops long enough to compliment me on my yard. There's the part where I remember that this long, painful rite of passage is perhaps vital to our survival, that because we believe it's the best way to preserve democracy and freedom we endure this rite of passage: Every four years, we tear ourselves apart, and somehow, when it's over, we put ourselves back together.
There has been talk of the next president being "tested" by other nations. Perhaps or electoral process is how we "test" the men and women who would lead us before we agree that they should. The painful, dirty, ugliness of this campaign has made it very clear to me who I prefer to have in the White House--and I have seen the men running for the highest office in the land changed, refined, worn closer to their essential selves, in the course of this campaign. Perhaps, awful as it is, it as as essential as labor is to giving birth.
In just a few days it will be November 5, and Main Street's reality will supersede the election reality. The signs will disappear. Campaign promises and rhetoric will be put away for a while. The losers will either cry "foul" and demand recounts, or they will go home and lick their wounds. And then whoever has won, whoever we have, together, with our nasty, flawed, arduous, irritating system, chosen to lead us will have to do so. I pity the man. And I hope and pray he's up to it.
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