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The Country Is Divided
By Charley Reese
11-6-2

The America media typically cover political campaigns as if they were horse races. There is a huge emphasis on what the polling numbers say, but virtually no coverage of the issues involved in the race. I wish that were not so, but it is.
 
Nevertheless, all the handicappers are discovering in this new election what was already known: The country is divided. That was the meaning of the razor-close race between George Bush and Al Gore. And that is the meaning of the unusual number of razor-close races for the House, Senate and governorships. Americans have different ideas on how the government should be run.
 
This kind of division is helpful, and it would be more helpful if opportunistic candidates didn't try to blur the differences. The late Sen. Paul Wellstone was respected because he remained true to his principles. He was liberal, whether it was popular or unpopular. Most officeholders are just opportunists. They have no principles or philosophy, and every vote they take is calculated on the basis of their next re-election campaign. Some votes are to pay off campaign contributors. Some votes are swapped with other politicians for pork-barrel projects. Other votes are just to avoid riling active special interests. It's a poor way to run a country, of course, but it is also what you might call the dirty laundry of democracy. You find pretty much the same practices in all the countries where there are popular elections. And these practices are certainly not new.
 
The division is helpful, because if both sides debate the issues honestly, then the people will have a clear understanding of both the problems and the proposed options for solving them. It's also part of the system of checks and balances. I'm not at all in favor of bipartisanship, though saying that does not mean I have any truck with fanatical partisanship. It is a good thing that former Rep. Newt Gingrich is out of office. His kind of partisanship was so personal and poisonous that Congress could hardly get any work done.
 
By the way, there was an old joke about Gingrich. The joke is that President Bush (the elder) is in a room with Yasser Arafat, Saddam Hussein and Newt Gingrich. The president has a gun but only two bullets. Who would he shoot? The answer is he would shoot Gingrich twice.
 
The two parties ought to clearly articulate their principles and then stick to them, applying them to the consideration of every issue that comes along. A voter who had a hankering to be a socialist would be hard put to decide whether Democrats or Republicans would be more likely to favor socialism. It all depends on how they read the polls. I would like to see all the opportunists replaced with true liberals and true conservatives.
 
It would also necessitate looking at geography. A Republican in Alabama cannot run on the same platform as a Republican in suburban New York City, and vice versa. The often-heard notion of a political party being a big tent is nonsense. All that means is that the only thing the party stands for really is winning elections and distributing patronage. Elections ought to be about more than those two things.
 
Political debate in America has degenerated into pure demagoguery. There have always been demagogues in politics, but there were once also men who had principles and knew how to argue them. They also knew that on some issues no compromise is possible. Abortion on demand is one such issue in our time. You can either be for it or against it, but the middle ground is not only cowardly but also immoral.
 
The elections will probably be over by the time you read this. I'm betting you will see that we remain a divided country.
 
© 2002 by King Features Syndicate, Inc.
 
 
 
 
http://reese.king-online.com/Reese_20021108/index.php





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