The blog’s new year begins with Post Number 101. I’m grateful for the chance to write here, and most especially for the people who read this blog and send me occasional comments. And to Jan and others who permit me to share their photos.
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| Henry, by Julia |
One faithful commenter who prefers to remain unnamed I’ll call GQ: the Great Questioner. From time to time I’m going to mention GQ as the inspiration for a post.
GQ asks, “Is it right to support or vote for the best of the worst?” Like many of GQ’s questions, I’ve thought about this a lot, but have never come up with an entirely satisfactory answer.
Even if I were running for office, I‘d probably find areas of disagreement with my own public positions. I doubt I’ll ever encounter a person running for office with whom I can agree entirely.
Disagreement is not a bad thing. My late wife and I used to adore long Saturday mornings sitting around drinking coffee in our bathrobes, having passionate arguments about the fine points of politics and public policy. For us, disputation was a form of recreation and even intimacy. As a bonus, our loud debates were the occasional cause of eye rolling from our kids in the back seat when we carried our fun into long car trips.
The airing of differences made our connection stronger. So I wonder why I haven’t felt this same divergence-based warmth with politicians.
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| Today's Bird Pictures By Jan |
I can think of two reasons. With Mary, I was a participant in a spirited conversation. We listened to each other (mostly), and often found ourselves modifying what we said and how we felt based on the discussion. Our discussions were not the airing of positions; they were more like negotiations.
Contrast this with politics: the politician and her or his experts craft statements about issues that are designed to produce one result: the maximum number of votes. All of these town hall meetings and listening tours can have an effect – but more on the wholesale level than retail. The chance that something I say will change that person’s mind, assuming I can penetrate the thick screen around most candidates, doesn’t seem likely.
Democracy is structured so that the many elect the one. It seems to me that it’s not unreasonable to expect this interchange – the granting of my vote to the person who most matches what I care about, to be one-sided instead of a true conversation.
The other issue in thinking about GQ’s question comes from single issue or hot button voting. Single issue politics is kind of like talking on the phone while driving – many of us cluck our tongues at it, but grant ourselves a Special Exemption when we want to do it ourselves.
I don’t think people should refuse to vote for someone because that person is pro-choice, or refuses to support the NRA’s lunatic promotion of high-capacity people-killing gun magazines or cop-killer bullets. I feel they should look at the whole candidate, not just how she is on that one topic.
But not so fast, let’s put the shoe on the other foot. Some years ago I had lunch with the late Sen. Paul Wellstone – a most decent and genuinely progressive man. I had come prepared with questions designed to give me further reasons to support him. I began by asking him about his vote for DOMA, the Defense of Marriage Act. I fed him the most softball Larry King-type question I could think of, setting him up to confirm that he supported marriage equality but had voted for this discriminatory federal law out of political necessity. Wellstone was Minnesota’s Senator during an era when actual political compromise was still occasionally practiced – as opposed to the 2011 Congress, which passed fewer bills in its term than any since the 1880s.Wellstone said no, he had voted for DOMA out of a moral, not political position. I stopped and thought about this, assuming I was just misunderstanding. Voting for the bill out of moral scruples would have meant he had moral objections to same sex marriage. Certainly a clearly kind-hearted and humanitarian person would have said the reverse. So I asked that, and Wellstone looked me in the eye and repeated that I had heard him correctly, and that no matter what the voters in Minnesota might feel, this was an issue where his moral position about the wrongness of gay and lesbian people marrying trumped any polls or political considerations.
The rest of the lunch was really awkward. Neither of us said much. At the end, the Senator asked if he could count on my support. Welltone saw me as a path to some important political supporters. I told him no, I was sorry, I wouldn’t be recommending that people support him. He looked me in the eye and without a word got up and walked away.
I regret the abrupt ending based on loggerheads with a man I so admired. I don’t regret having hit that particular hot button. I’m willing to vote for President Obama, maybe because he’s more adept (or maybe less honest than Sen. Wellstone?) at articulating positions on gay rights that appear founded more on expedience than on a personal hate-based position.
So let’s round back to GQ’s question. More than three-quarters of Americans talk on the phone while driving, even though half of people in the US think this is the most dangerous of driving distractions. So I think the first step as we frame our responses to GQ is to hop off the high horse to inventory and acknowledge our own personal hot buttons. This sets up a screen that makes the question of settling on a ho-hum candidate easy: eliminate those who hits your buttons, for example in my schematic, anti-choice (marriage and uteruses), anti-Semites and racists, libertarians. But I have voted for supporters of the NRA and other miserable causes.
The late great American philosopher Richard Rorty talked about each person having a "final vocabulary" – concepts that are so basic to your way of seeing the world, to your core values and conscience, that you have trouble even defining them. I think your final vocabulary leads you to your political hot buttons. There’s no arguing with it – figure out where your line is, and don’t cross it. But aside from those hopefully few hot buttons, get out there and participate in the process that governs important features of your daily life.
If the candidate you find least objectionable survives the Button Test, vote for the person who’s closest to your position who you think can actually win. (The 2000 election inoculated me for life against protest votes. In my book, voting is a process for selection of people in government – protests work best in other forums).
If you possibly can, vote. Stay in the game. Be a player.
