Superlatives aside, I think everyone can agree that we have one those Major Elections coming up that are purported to mark Turning Points in History. We’ve seen many so touted that weren’t. It may be that the presidents involved in those Non Major Elections went on to be remarkable due to what transpired under their administrations, but that doesn’t turn their elections into something that could have been recognized as Turning Points. In a smaller sense, all presidential elections are turning points, because by the nature of our system we can mark shifts in historical currents handily under the heading of who is in the White House when the hairpin switchback came on us. But the fact that a given president was elected as major turning point? You have to look at what was actually at stake before the vote was cast and ask, in the context of the times, how much change was actually anticipated that would not occur had anyone else run and been elected.
That narrows it somewhat. By that definition, JFK qualifies—based on his youth and Catholicism, and one can debate which was more telling—as does Carter, based on a rejection of Nixon’s Imperial Presidency, since people stated clearly that an appointed Vice President represented too big a shift in our perception of acceptable politics to be tolerated.
Before that? Hayes, because of the national jerrymandering that resulted in his ascendancy. Lincoln certainly, since his election split the Union, and everyone knew that was in the cards. Jefferson because of his repudiation of Washington/Adams national policy.
In my opinion, most elections, in spite of the rhetoric, do not hinge on epoch-making change. Finer points can be argued, but the perceived good or bad of the candidates usually hinge on personal views of which of two roads leading in much the same direction is the better. The direction is not that different. FDR picked up and enlarged policies Hoover had already begun—recovery from the Depression was the issue and both candidates agreed. Distinctions of method did not inform the electorate, only matters of which candidate the people trusted to Do Something. As it turned out, FDR’s presidency did alter the national landscape, but the promise of such alterations did not inform the election. And in the case of Kennedy, people expected the country to change profoundly—positively or negatively—because of his election, but in fact it really didn’t change that much. Not due to the president, at any rate.
What we have before us now, though, is such a pivotal election, and one that has its roots in ideological perceptions ranging across the spectrum.
Since the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980, the divide has grown clearer by the decade between two camps that seem more and more irreconcilable. They differ profoundly over basic ideological concepts concerning economy, religion, foreign policy, science, and civil liberties. Not that the presidential candidates have differed all that much—both parties have striven to nominate candidates acceptable to the broad middle ground that exists between these camps—but the ideals and interests that drive people to the polls are more and more extreme, both sides struggling to find a candidate who will embody some kind of overwhelming choice, a fulcrum that will lever the country onto one path or the other, and in this debate those paths diverge profoundly.
Until Hilary Clinton lost finally to Barack Obama, it appeared that the race would be between candidates who pretty well embraced that ethic. Oh, certainly the fact that Hilary is a woman would have made this a Major Election, but her politics conform to the “least offense to the greatest number” ideal that has been informing party choices for a long time. Obama is arguably not in that mold. Agree or disagree with his stated ideas, he does not really fit that description. He’s young enough to believe differences can be made, basic changes can occur, and a better road can be built. Whether he’s ultimately allowed to do that is another question. But people perceive him to be an agent of change that is legitimate and sincere and potentially effective.
I don’t actually believe John McCain is his equivalent, but the fact is he is perceived by his supporters as such. It doesn’t matter. He embodies 20th century policy programs. He is of That Era. Maverick or not, his “independence” serves a vision of the United States that would be recognizable to someone facing the Kennedy-Nixon contest. He’s still arguing over the New Deal and the Great Society and whether or not it’s in our best long term interests to “give money to people who don’t work for it.” He probably still has some vague attachment to what has become a cliched envisioning of an Arcadian America, Traditional Family Values, and that while he wouldn’t himself advocate stripping women of their current rights and freedoms, maybe he believes it wouldn’t be so bad if women stopped “trying to be men” and went back to being wives and mothers and give up the struggle for equality. (Why else would he, the Maverick, embrace a Pro-Life policy, which if fully implemented by those who push it most fervently would lead to a regress to exactly that, overturning not only Roe v Wade but also Griswold?) Maybe he has some vague understanding that the future belongs to a changed global interaction and energy will have to come in new forms, but he stills understands such things in terms of oil and corporate hegemony.
His selection as the Republican candidate is a lukewarm repudiation of Bush, not because Bush was ideologically wrong, but because Bush failed. The reasons for his failure do not seem well understood by the Right. Talk of tactics and strategy avoid the harder analysis of basic direction. But McCain looks new, at least to Republicans, and I’m not sure why.
Obama, whether his ideas would work or not, is new. Not, perhaps, as radically as his detractors suggest, but…
Even so, the election itself will not hinge on that. What it hinges on is what we as a polity will find it acceptable to conceive in political terms. It makes comparisons to Kennedy all the more telling and relevant. What Kennedy’s election said was that this country, after 180 years of anti-Catholic sentiment, could conceive of the notion that all the horror stories about papists and religion were wrong, and that is would be possible to trust a Catholic to set his Catholicism aside and be a secular leader. It said that we as a country could embrace a new perception at the highest level.
I think this boldness on the part of the electorate carried us through the Sixties, changing one damn thing after another, until, exhausted at the terminus of the Vietnam War we faltered and found ourselves persuaded that all that change might have been in error, and at the end of the confused Seventies we embraced someone who suggested we could have The Good Old Days back. It was this shift in national mindset that Kennedy embodied that was important and made his election a Major One—a paradigm shift that we still carry with us. In the end it didn’t matter what Kennedy did, it mattered what we did.
So it will be in this election. Obama represents a paradigm shift—not that he would in any way be sure of fulfilling it, but insofar as we as a nation would elect him. It suggests that we are about to make a bold statement as a people about the 20th century and the Olde Time Crap that is currently crippling the Republicans.
But it is also the first election in a long, long time that cannot be predicted. Until the votes are in, there is no basis for making predictions.
What has been happening in many districts on the local level for years now is a curious malaise setting in among Republican voters. They are experiencing what Democrats were up till now—if asked, they state their support for this candidate or that, but on the day it seems in many places they’re just staying home. The majority of Democrats now in congress can be to some degree attributed to this. The Republicans are exhausted. I think many of them are also disgusted. I think many of them are just as weary of the right wing jeremiad as the Left is. The trouble is, it makes polling totally irrelevant.
As does Obama’s race. Odious as it may sound, it’s possible many people are telling pollsters that they support him, but on the day, standing in that booth, the decision before them, many of those same people may decide that they really aren’t ready to have a black man as president.
I would like to think I’m wrong. I hope so. But it renders all polls problematic.
We won’t know till the count is in.
It may also be that the paradigm shift I mentioned has already occurred, and that just the fact that Obama is taken seriously and there has been as little racial flavor to this election as there would have been in, say, 1984 (and yes, the New Yorker notwithstanding, there really has been damn little race-baiting so far) means we’ve already moved past something we’ve been struggling to get over since Brown v the Board of Education. (Yes, the same can be said of Hilary being taken so seriously.)
The vote in November may well be a turning point, not because Barack Obama might win, but because by winning we will have made a statement about which road to take. That makes it a Major Election. Obama therefore doesn’t have to be the equivalent of past great presidents—he doesn’t have to be Kennedy (who wasn’t all that great) or FDR or Teddy. All he has to be is a clear signpost at the fork in the road.
