In the ‘90s I remember seeing a T-shirt bearing the slogan “If God wanted us to vote, he would’ve given us candidates.” The shirt was a response to years and years of Reagan/Bush reign and then the Clinton regime, but it seems more salient here in 2024.
Twenty-twenty four’s yin-and-yang of major party picks gave us a bizarre campaign cycle on many fronts, but as to the candidates themselves, in one corner we had sitting VP Kamala Harris, who, despite an absurdly well-funded and organized campaign, could not offer up any answers as to how to pay for many of her policy proposals.
In the opposite corner was Donald Trump, whose answer to everything seems to be tariffs and mass deportations.
With Trump in the Oval Office for another four-year term, the opposing side will spend the next four years attempting to convince us peons that our lives are somehow miserable under the watch of their opponent.
It would have been the same old tired routine if Harris would’ve won, and it’s been that way under Joe Biden’s watch.
Just look at Trump’s campaign. He did one heck of a job convincing the country that the economy was wrecked, and forever doomed unless he was placed back in the White House. He does, after all, possess a magic lever that will reverse inflation and boost consumer confidence through the roof, as well as make unemployment numbers plummet.
After the election was called and Harris conceded, I did breathe a sigh of relief on one front: at least this time around, there were no screams and wails about a stolen election, mass election fraud, etcetera, etcetera.
It was disturbing, though, to see the deficit in the voter turnout this year versus 2024. Voter apathy rained down hard, to the tune of 11 million or so voters not turning out to the polls as they had four years prior. It’s especially bothersome when considering that this year saw record numbers of new voters added to the polls.
Maybe if candidates actually spoke to Americans and spoke to actual issues instead of playing the old divide-and-conquer song and dance, then so many folks would not have stayed home. Imagine if candidates actually cared more about America than just winning elections.
Rep. Dean Phillips, who represents a Minnesotan congressional district as a Democrat, identifies on his social media descriptions as a “radical pragmatist.” He said in an interview on Fox News Sunday that neither of the major parties are serving American interests at present and called the majority of Americans “the exhausted majority.”
Phillips said in the interview that leaders must start setting aside “the nonsense,” and that “people of competence, decency and integrity” must be elevated in politics. I’m afraid, however, that as long as there is big money derived from broadcasting the chaos that politicians truck in and drumming up righteous indignation from it all among the electorate, then the corporations who own those media outlets, as well as most of the lawmakers on the Beltway, will continue to fuel those flames.
The late, great sage George Carlin once opined that politics was “a big club, and you ain’t in it.” Nowadays that seems an axiom ever so true, what, with corporations afforded personhood in order to buy elections and a generation of leadership becoming celebrities instead of serving We the People.
To combine musings from two great American philosophers, Messrs. Tyler and Mellencamp, it’s the same old story, the same old song and dance, ah, but ain’t that America?
