There was a time when the divide between right and left, Republican and Democrat, didn’t seem anything remotely approaching the chasm that exists today. I imagine for the millions of whatever alphabetically labeled generations are included in ages 18-40, there may have never been a point in their lifetime when they saw much in the way of political bipartisanship, but for those of us a bit older, we can at least conjure up fuzzy memories of a less toxic environment.
I’ve been a Democrat for virtually all of my adult life, but I can still recall a time when there were a number of Republican Party standard bearers whose election to the presidency wouldn’t necessarily have made my head spiral like a bad remake of “The Exorcist.” That’s primarily because we used to elect national leaders based on things other than anointing those with the most rabid extremist views from either the left or right. Somewhere along the line, that started to change, and once it did the movement’s logical conclusion has left us with a lineup of presidential candidates that looks more like a casting call for a Monty Python movie than it does a protracted distillation of years and even decades of public service that yields the best and the brightest as they elbow their way into the national spotlight.
I interviewed Bob Dole when he was dutifully poking around Republican primaries in 1980 in a thwarted bid for the presidency, but here was a man with impeccable credentials who couldn’t get elected because he wasn’t telegenic and didn’t have the superficial qualities that we apparently deem more important than musty old medals from heroic service in world wars or several decades in the trenches of the United State Senate. Hell, in 2004 we couldn’t bring ourselves to elect the wooden John Kerry in place of the already discredited Junior Bush, despite the fact that he had similarly imposing Senate credentials and a chest-full of medals from Vietnam. Nope, we gleefully permitted the Bush media machine to talk us out of that quaint notion that Kerry was a decorated veteran. To his own eternal discredit, Kerry himself deserves much of the blame for that one for not standing up in front of the TV cameras and calling out the Swift Boat assassins as the chuckleheads that they were.
But whatever Kerry was (is), it’s sad that we seem to value flash over substance in just about every last corner of American life. What does it say about us as a people that we are allegedly seriously considering presidential bids from pretenders wacky and so far out on the fringe that earlier generations wouldn’t have permitted them to be the chairman of the Lion’s Club annual picnic? I would have said 30 years ago that it started with Ronald Reagan, when millions of Americans went gaga over a B-movie actor that they apparently trusted because he had wheedled his way into their homes on a grainy, black-and-white television screen as the host of General Electric Theatre and Death Valley Days.
Reagan begat George W. Bush, who slavishly idolizes the two-term ideologue president while damning his own father – a genuine war hero from World War II rather than one who simply hawked war bonds – with faint praise. Once we elevated the frat boy “W” to the national stage, all antique notions of gravitas and finding serious time-tested candidates for the highest office in the land were shunted aside. Heaven knows, anything goes.
We rolled the dice with a guy to be the most powerful individual on the planet, perhaps assuming that the office carried with it enough adults and serious thinkers that his apparent lack of maturity and a privileged upbringing wouldn’t matter that much in the White House. I mean, how bad could it be?
Eight years later we are starting to find out, but the final tally on our horrific flirtation with Bush Lite won’t be known for many, many decades. For a small sampling, try to imagine what the current situation would be without several additional trillions of dollars to the national debt, a devastated economy that owes most of its infirmity to the mayhem fostered from the Bush 43 regime, or a climate of partisan hostility that certainly wasn’t invented by Junior but was certainly refined into an art form during his tenure.
And now, a couple of years after a once serious national figure, John McCain, gingerly shoved a Bachelorette wannabe forward into prominence as his vice presidential running mate, we’ve apparently come full circle to where the credentials needed to run for President are roughly the same as those desired in a pitchman for a reality-television series.
McCain (admittedly once a serious individual) begat Palin; Palin begat Trump; Trump begat Bachmann; and now, just to show you we can nicely blur the distinction between ribald comedy and blood-curdling horror, Bachmann has begat Perry. In the blink of an eye, we are now contemplating sending another Texas blowhard back to Washington to finish up what the Junior Bush so contemptuously started at the dawn of this millennium. Only this time we’ve found a really scary cowboy who truly believes the ideological effluvium that he espouses, rather than simply being a hand puppet for his behind-the-curtain elders in the West Wing.
I had so hoped that we had actually learned something useful from the Bush II years, but if we truly had, we wouldn’t be sitting on our sofas and flipping around with the remote listening to somebody so unhinged and out of the mainstream that he would talk up the merits of states seceding when the nasty old Federal Government gets in the way. That’s who I had always hoped for in a President: a guy still on the fence about preserving the union he would be swearing an oath to protect and defend.
When did we stop being a serious nation?
- T.S. O’Connell
After eight years of George Bush, it’s kind of nice to have a grownup
President like Barack Obama in the White House.
(Original artwork by Darryl Vlasak)
