Reflecting on Elections

I don’t usually write about politics, since I tend to get a little hyperbolic, not to say snarky. This year is an exception to my ban on political writing, because what we see and hear in the press and in electronic media from TV to twitter is so much more hyperbolic than even I could manage.

This year I am also old enough to know that most of what I hear the country rant and rave about will not be as momentous as it seems now. I do not say that it doesn’t matter who is president. It matters profoundly. I just remind us how many things come along to overturn the certainty of what we thought we knew.

I will start with my first election. I was not old enough to vote, voting age was 21 in 1960 and I was just 16, but I still feel like it was my first election because I lived in Massachusetts and Kennedy was someone I knew, even as a teen. My parents were Republican and were tepidly for Nixon, but, probably because they voted for Nixon, I hoped Kennedy would win.

But think. In 1960 did we know that Kennedy would be assassinated or that Nixon, defeated in 1960 would be elected in 1968 or that he would resign two years into his second term in the aftermath of the Watergate hearings? Did we know how damaging it would be to George McGovern when he chose Thomas Eagleton as his vice-presidential running mate only to have to ask him to withdraw when Eagleton’s treatment for depression became public? Did we know that Iran would capture U.S. citizens and hold them as hostages and that because of that Carter would lose the presidency to a film actor who was formerly a Democrat? And who saw it coming when in 2000 the Supreme Court would essentially decide the outcome after two weeks when the world awaited their decision on the awarding of electoral votes in Florida? In 1960 was it even imaginable that the United States would ever elect a black man as president? Now Obama has been elected for two terms.

Yet this year we behave as if every caucus is vitally important to determining our next president. Many of them are of marginal importance even to determining who the candidates will be. The process of voting for convention delegates varies so from state to state that it is hard to remember which states have winner-take-all primaries and which states award delegates to the national convention proportionally. It is also true that nobody can predict how delegates will vote after the first round if the candidate they are pledged to, and perhaps even their second choice, is out of the running.

I haven’t even mentioned how vice-presidential candidates are chosen, with nary a popular vote, although in the years since 1960 it has mattered immensely. Since then Kennedy was assassinated and Nixon resigned, twice making the vice-president our president. Many people don’t even remember the name Geraldine Ferraro, and Sarah Palin may have been more of a liability to John McCain as a running mate than an asset.

So, my fellow citizens, listen to debates, read or watch the media, have your favorites, make your decisions, I certainly will, but don’t delude yourself that you know what will happen if your candidate wins. The history of elections since 1960 should teach us better.