Why I Vote

Below is an essay I wrote several months ago, during the primary races, to accompany a donation to the Obama campaign. I thought it appropriate to share on Election Day. Even though it supports a particular candidate, I think it also delivers a message that might resonate with all citizens, regardless of who they cast their ballots for. Don't forget to vote!

--------------------------------------------------

I vote.

I vote regularly, almost religiously. I vote in cutthroat presidential battles as well as in boring, uncontested plebiscites for the local board of education.

Too often I do so while holding my nose.

For most of my adult life I’ve carefully guarded my undeclared voter-registration status and bemoaned the bitterly partisan nature of our politics. Why, I’ve long wondered, are so many elected officials more concerned with winning arguments — on getting and staying elected — than they are with solving our problems?

A big part of the answer to that question, I have theorized, is that so many private citizens are similarly obsessed — perhaps the cumulative effect of so many years of The McLaughlin Group, Crossfire, Limbaugh, The New York Post, the Drudge Report, Dan Abrams and Air America pounding a once-engaged citizenry into knee-jerk know-nothingism. Another big reason is that so many Americans could completely care less. Some have been so turned off by our infantile politics as to completely tune it out; Others are too busy trying to make ends meet and content with simpler pastimes like reality TV, Page Six and Us Weekly. The result: most Americans don’t bother to vote. And we are left with the candidates — and the leadership — that we deserve.

So when I find myself in the ballot box, increasingly it’s a dutiful exercise, not something I’m excited about or proud of. I vote for Democrats on my town council and board of education because Republicans dominate those bodies and because most people where I live are so reflexively anti-Democrat as to blindly disregard good public-policy ideas just because Republicans didn’t invent them. Conversely, I vote for Republicans to serve in the county government, which is in the stranglehold of a corrupt, wasteful Democratic machine that makes me pay more in property taxes than I rightly should so that it can buy votes and campaign contributions with government jobs and contracts. In both cases, I know that the candidates I support will lose, and lose big.

I know that my state and federal legislative districts, like so many throughout the country, are feats of gerrymandering worthy of Rube Goldberg, producing seats so safely in the column of one party that they render meaningless the spirit of free and fair elections. I know that races for statewide and federal offices have become made-for-TV battles of the substance-free sound bite. I know that a class of truly reprehensible human beings will function as sometimes-anonymous surrogates who will say, write, mail and post on the internet false and unfair statements about their opponents that the candidates themselves would never deign to utter in public. I know that in these campaigns there will be generous doses of “gotcha” quotes dredged up, liberated from all context and leaked to the press by opposition research teams. I know that there will be fliers left underneath windshield wipers in Wal-Mart parking lots intimating that candidates are somehow of the wrong race, religion or sexuality for a particular segment of voters.

I know that these are the malodorous byproducts of what has come to be known as the Permanent Campaign. From my vantage point, as someone who came of age during the 1990s, the Permanent Campaign is a creation of Bill and Hillary Clinton and those who have supported their political careers. I know that’s not completely true in the purest sense; Nixon and his ilk practiced dirty tricks, to be sure. And as a student of history I know that the Jacksonian era was marked by intense partisanship and appeals by politicians to the basest voter impulses. But even if the Clintons didn’t create the Permanent Campaign, they certainly reinvented it for the Information Age. You were either with them or you were against them.

I voted for Bill Clinton twice — the first time with youthful exuberance and the second with more than a little skepticism. During this time I also took note of Clinton Hatred, a passion that so infected Republicans that it impaired their ability to serve the public as elected officials and contribute to our democracy as citizens. The poisoned well of our politics grew more toxic still with the controversy over the election of 2000. And now that we can view the Bush-Cheney administration in hindsight it is clear that it has taken the Permanent Campaign to a new, more perfect and damaging level.

Our leaders have spent nearly two decades choosing the Permanent Campaign over devoting their considerable talents to solving the nation’s problems. During that same time many of our citizens have preferred scoring points and landing insults, in cocktail-party and blog arguments about politics, over finding ways to heal our collective ills. Or they simply haven’t been paying attention. As a result, our problems have grown worse.

Now the nation confronts war without end, recklessly and incompetently prosecuted; an economic crisis the likes of which have not been seen in more than a generation; a world that once revered the United States now openly hostile to it; the real danger that segments of our society are becoming so economically and socially disenfranchised that they will revolt against the established order; the list of maladies goes on. These are big problems getting bigger for the neglect of our leaders. It makes me sad. I often blame myself as much as I find fault in others, thinking that I should be a more engaged citizen. But work, family and fatigue too often stand in the way of that ideal path.

I know that one person cannot change all of this. Not one candidate — even one running for president — and surely not just one voter. But I’m encouraged that Senator Obama has chosen to say publicly some of the things that I’ve been thinking as a disgruntled but patriotic American all these years and to make changing this state of affairs so central to his campaign. Make no mistake: I’m still skeptical. It’s certainly convenient that a campaign focused on such ideals differentiates Senator Obama from his chief rival, who so embodies the bitterly divided politics of the past two decades. But the more I see, the more I learn, the more I believe that he’s sincere. Maybe not 100% sincere about every single thing, but as sincere as our political environment permits a presidential candidate to be. I read his memoir, Dreams From My Father, and am heartened that for the first time in my memory we might have a president who is capable of serious introspection and is not completely captive to an elephantine ego.

For all the reasons I’ve laid out in this too-preachy diatribe of an essay, it is not easy in America today for such a person to become president. And that is precisely why I want Senator Obama living in the White House. I know that I do not, and will not, agree with everything he believes in, and that I’ll object to some of the things he does in office should he win the presidency. But I believe that he will listen. He will listen to me and to the rest of the American people, as well as to his peers of all ideological stripes in Washington and throughout the world. And he will strive with us to solve our problems rather than divide us for politics’ sake while our democracy — and indeed, the world — becomes sicker.

That is why I support Senator Obama.

That is why I vote.