Ballot Box Blues: The Most Dispiriting Election of a Lifetime

[Big Bill Jefferson]

Ballot Box Blues
The Most Dispiriting Election of a Lifetime (Mine)
by Tom Engelhardt

By the time you read this, I'll already have voted -- the single most reflexive political act of my life -- in the single most dispiriting election I can remember. As I haven't missed a midterm or presidential election since my first vote in 1968, that says something. Or maybe by the time you've gotten to this, the results of the 2010 midterm elections will be in. In either case, I'll try to explain just why you don't really need those results to know which way the wind is gusting.

First, though, a little electoral history of me. Certainly, my version of election politics started long before I could vote. I remember collecting campaign buttons in the 1950s and also -- for the 1956 presidential campaign in which Dwight Eisenhower (and his vice president, Richard Nixon) faced off against Democratic Party candidate Adlai Stevenson - singing this ditty:

Whistle while you work,
Nixon is a jerk,
Eisenhower has no power,
Stevenson will work!

Even in the world of kids, even then, politics could be gloves-off stuff. Little good my singing did, though: Stevenson was trounced, thus beginning my political education. My father and mother were dyed-in-the-wool Depression Democrats, and my mother was a political caricaturist for the then-liberal (now Murdoch-owned) tabloid, the New York Post. I still remember the fierce drawings she penned for that paper's front page of red-baiting Senator Joe McCarthy. She also came away from those years filled with political fears, reflected in her admonition to me throughout the 1960s: "It's the whale that spouts that gets caught."

Still, I was sold on the American system. It was a sign of the times that I simply couldn't wait to vote. The first election rally I ever attended, in 1962, was for John F. Kennedy, already president. I remember his face, a postage-stamp-sized blur of pink, glimpsed through a sea of heads and shoulders. Even today, I can feel a remnant of the excitement and hope of that moment. In those years before our government had become "the bureaucracy" in young minds, I was imbued with a powerful sense of civic duty that, I suspect, was commonplace. I daydreamed relentlessly about becoming an American diplomat and so representing my country to the world.

...

http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/175315/tomgram%3A_engelhardt%2C_pentagon_lovers_and_welfare_queens/

[blogslut]

1. Oh well

We all have our opinions.

I'm pretty jazzed about today.

[leveymg]

1980 and 2000 were real shockers because both elections were essentially stolen

Now's not the time to explore just how the Bad Guys did that, but they did. This time, I think we gave it away by not doing enough with the mandate we were given, in good-faith, by the American people. So, the Democrats will be all but cast out into the wilderness again, to endure another 10 or 20 years as the opposition party in a divided government - a role which I think many of our elected representatives like better than being part of the ruling party.

Like Engelhardt, I too came from a family of liberal Democrats. My father used to joke that he was the only Naval Officer in the Fifth Fleet who will admit voting for Adlai Stevenson. My grandfather was a Hollywood Producer who made integrated musical films in the 1940s - Hellzapoppin' and New Orleans, at a time that just wasn't done in that industry.

As for me, my first political memory was as a three-year-old riding on my father's shoulders on a sunny but crisp Fall Day in a sea of people in New Haven, CT. A man with a nice smile came by and reached up and shook my hand. My parents told me later that man was John Fitzgerald Kennedy.

I've been a Democrat long enough to know that I always will be, but am beginning to doubt the relevance of that fact. Dispirited is, indeed, the word for what I'm feeling today, as indeed it is for many of my friends here at DU. That fellowship I cherish, as it sustains my hope for the party and the country. We will endure.

Thank you, DUers all.

- Mark

[sinkingfeeling]

2. I agree with this 100%, although I'm a couple of years younger than Tom.

[n2doc]

3. After 2004 nothing shocks me

4 years of failure, recession, and war based on lies. And still people voted in enough numbers to put the war criminals back in (with help or not from election fraud).

[MineralMan]

4. Thanks so much for another pessimistic post on Election Day!

I can't tell you how much I appreciate it. I even went to the link and read about the writer's disappointment so I could get even more depressed. You've truly made my Election Day more depressing. :sarcasm:

Unrecced for trying to suppress the vote by Democrats.

[EFerrari]

5. Tom is right on about the avalanche of money.

There are real reasons to be dispirited this year. I was grateful, though, to have Jerry Brown and Barbara Boxer to help get my motivation up. And from the reporting, it looks like turn out will be better than expected -- that's encouraging, too, that people are trying to be active on their own behalf.

We must do something about how we fund and conduct elections. Hopefully, Citizens United will be a tipping point.