Nov 5, 2010
Every election has winners and losers, but this November 2nd appears to have delivered a bit more collateral damage than usual. There are those who are disappointed that the tempest never really got out of the teapot. There are others who found you could spend a pretty penny and still get a very ugly result. And still others, maybe only a few stalwart party loyalists or anti-federalists, who are a bit less than amused that an endorsement at the national level could end the party for both parties and deliver a first-time independent governor for our smallest state (Maybe Tip O’Neill was wrong—not all politics is local).
There is also my colleague in the political trade who remarked a week ago that he felt like he was living in a foreign land for the past nine months. He groaned via email that he wished he had retired, at least professionally, a year ago. Today’s politics just make little sense to him, I guess.
Then, there is me. I am happy as a quahaug (I just can’t seem to get RI off my mind)!
Why?
Partly, I must admit, I am happy because I have actually lived in a foreign land with bigger problems than U.S. politics to concentrate on for the past nine months, and so for me, the entire election cycle transpired in under 24 hours. There was no waiting and no protracted set of prognostications or too-early-to-tell moments—I don’t get any TV signal, let alone cable. I just woke up the morning after and typed in “election results” in the Google bar. Bingo!
Mainly, I am happy because our national government, wisely broken into separate parts by our founding architects, is now also divided, at least partially, across party lines. This gives us a better chance of hearing open debates as well as productive bi-partisan dialogue rather than the sour-grapes rancor and power-mongering speeches we have been subjected to for the past two years.
Checks and balances are here again—hooray! That is three exclamation points so far—I told you I was giddy.
I remember learning about Checks and Balances in ninth grade civics class. I really liked that class. It was my only class, other than gym, that was un-leveled. The student make up was decided by alphabetical order according to our last names. There was not a civics class for fast learners and another one for those who struggled with academics. Even at fourteen, I knew that this was the right context to discuss politics and civic responsibility.
Civics class remains one of the few educational experiences that I can remember clearly as I head into my fifties. I can still see where I sat, and I remember the names of the students who sat around me. Sadly, I do not remember the name of my teacher—just what he looked like. Besides the theory of checks and balances, I learned in that Civics class that effective government must represent the interests of everyone, lest it become pork belly cronyism driven by the need to fulfill campaign promises made to special interest groups.
I also learned my favorite political word of all in that class: gerrymandering. The word has such a great ring to it. I like to define it as election by invitation.
Unfortunately for my sense of patriotic pride, I have learned more recently that our Founders were not the first to come up with the separation of powers which creates the mechanism of checks and balances. It turns out a French fellow with a name a little too large to print on a business card lays claim to its invention: Charles-Louis de Secondat, baron de La Brède et de Montesquieu. We also have to give credit to the British who got it partially right even before the United States or France. Just like the British to be radical in an understated way.
Besides a return to a two-party Washington, there is the election of Jerry “Moonbeam” Brown to smile about. I do not know if he can help California, and I certainly do not agree with his campaign’s adamant embrace of pro-choice, but I sure like the optimism of a guy who was first governor when I was ten years old claiming, “I want to build for the future. That is what it is all about.” And I thought my dad was an optimist for buying two new cars at 82.