A group called “Ask Men” did a lot of asking around and came up with a list of the 49 most influential men in the country. Television comedian Jon Stewart topped the list. President Barack Obama came in 21st. Obama was first in 2008, dropped to third in 2009 and then went down in flames.
Whatever or whoever “Ask Men” is or are, one of the explanations for the 180-degree about-face in U.S. politics over the past two years is that both the Republican and the Democrat parties have pretty much gone away.
The “ins” and the “outs” took their place. The change has taken time coming. Sometime within the past two decades, or maybe longer, party loyalty be-gan to weaken. More and more of us said we voted for the candidate, not the party. That move away from political parties was bolstered by the rise of special interest groups and issue-oriented political organizations.
Gun control and abortion, for example, made as much difference in the voting booth as Republican and Democrat. Single-issue politics then morphed into ideologies. We became conservatives, liberals or moderates — and sometimes chose not to add a party label to those categories.
But none of today’s political labels imply or require loyalty or, to put it another way, invoke a sense of belonging or provide purpose for the majority of those who wear them. Those who joined the yes-we-can brigades in 2008 have no problem chanting no-no-not-never in 2010.
When the same voters who tossed out the Re-publicans two years ago give the House of Representatives to the Republicans next Tuesday and leave the Senate in a virtual tie only a literalist could argue that the Republican Party itself can take credit for the switch. The voters will not have become followers of Republicanism. They merely will have decided to throw the “ins” out.
And if the economy continues to bump along the bottom, the new “ins” could well become the new “outs” in 2012.
THESE ARE NOT value judgments. U.S. politics did not produce better government when a man’s political party was also his identity. Voting a straight ticket has al-ways been mindless politics.
What happens when parties don’t matter, however, is that candidates rather than issues command the attention of the voter. Our present circumstances illustrate. In 2008 it seemed that a solid majority of the voters favored fundamental health care reform and meaningful reduction of greenhouse gases. Those were two of the major planks in the Obama platform.
Today the members of the House and Senate who supported those initiatives and are running for re-election face de-feat.
Those who voted no proudly boast about it.
So it is probably fair to say that Obama was elected president be-cause of himself rather than his platform.
That is not a comforting thought. In an election the people should work for and vote for candidates who share their governmental goals as well as for men and women who seem best qualified to govern. When the personal characteristics of the candidates determine who is elected, the unspoken judgment is that issues don’t matter.
Since issues do matter, it can be predicted with confidence that the political pendulum will swing back toward the pragmatic problem-solvers who will be elected for what they want to accomplish rather than who they are. When this happens, the political parties will be naturally restored because they are the most efficacious way for like-thinkers to achieve political power to accomplish political goals.
— Emerson Lynn, jr.
