Today is election day, 2008 style. If you have failed thus far to exercise your American right and obligation to participate in the national process of choosing our course for the next two years (mid-term elections are for those who have second thoughts, after all,) then you need to put down your laptop or your cell phone, get in the car, and get to your polling place.
Voting is your privilege, one that thousands of men and women have fought and died for. You owe it to them, as much as yourself, to exercise the right that started with a harbor full of tea and a wild ride by Paul Revere. It brought Lincoln to the battlefield of Gettysburg, and took our soldiers to the Battle of Belleau Wood and the beaches of Normandy, the Battle of the Bulge and Iwo Jima. The defense of democracy has brought us to Korea and Vietnam and Afghanistan, and wherever we fight for the rights of people to guide their own futures, we are fighting a righteous battle of justice denied.
Voting is not a frivolous act. On the contrary, it is one of gravity and seriousness; one must approach that ballot with respect and contemplation. The American electoral process is the most peaceful large scale transition of power in the world, and people across the globe will be watching us to see how we handle the change.
I have been truly disheartened by this campaign season, in particular, as we have seen the electoral process subverted by several different voting irregularities. I do not care what party you believe has the answers, you should be equally appalled at voter registration fraud and the distribution of e-mail and flyers telling one party to vote on the wrong day.
I think both are equally damaging to the electoral process, and both should be prosecuted to the fullest extent that our federal laws allow. It is not a joke to interfere with the right and ability of a person to vote, and anyone who is disenfranchised because of the wrongful action of someone else is a person who has been cheated out of being part of their own solution. A person's right to vote is not rooted in being Republican or Democrat, it is the foundational right of being an American. To deny that makes you, in my opinion, not partisan, but un-American.
In an election where there is no incumbent, it is particularly exciting, because the opportunity to change course is greater. Whomever is the winner in the final count, they will most certainly bring in new people, have new ideas, approach our national problems, which at this juncture in our nation's history are monumental, in a new and fresh way. Regardless of what was said in the campaigns, the reality is that there are pressing problems, issues which are going to challenge us as a country, which must be solved with support by both sides. Without cooperation, we will surely fail, and our country will be the worse for it.
I recall clearly the first presidential advertisement that I saw, probably two years ago now. I can't recall for sure who it was - possibly Hillary Clinton - although my impression is that it was a minor candidate that never made it out of the starting gate. I groaned, fearing that it would be a long two years. I was right to groan, I believe, because it has, indeed, been a long two years of electioneering and campaigning, candidates haranguing us by television, telephone, print ads, e-mails, snail mail, and radio.
Do we really know our candidates any better because of the two year time frame? What is to stop a candidate from starting another campaign tomorrow? The cost, the time, and most importantly, the amount of work not getting done by our candidates who are on the trail, are too high.
I would like to know how many votes Barack Obama, John McCain, and Joe Biden have missed in the last two years, and how many they have made. I would also like to know how much they knew about the votes they did and did not make, and whether they voted through knowledge or because someone else told them how they thought. This is a bi-partisan crack of the whip - I think the problem is widespread, and goes in every direction.
The national election even disrupts the policy making process at the state level, as our governors and statewide elected representatives get on the campaign stump. My governor, Kathleen Sebelius, is a good case in point.
She is, by and large, a pretty good Governor, a Democrat of moderate persuasion overall, who has a long record of working with the heavily conservative Republican majority in the state legislature. However, in the last few months, she has spent far too much time on the national stage, in my opinion, and not nearly enough time on what it was she was elected to do here in Kansas. I am driven to contemplate whether she was running for a national position herself, and if our state interests were subverted to her political desires.
I would throw in Sarah Palin, but she is, in fact, the case in point for my own thesis, that a short time frame does not, in fact, prevent us from knowing a candidate. The reality is that with the 24 hour news cycle, and the widespread use of the internet, a person can go from unknown to an international figure in less than a day. I do not feel that there is any real stone left unturned with regard to someone whose name did not register for me three short months ago. I feel that I have her measure, and I know everything I need to about her character, her nature, her positions and her qualifications for being Vice President.
I want to limit the assault of campaigning. If you know me well, you have probably already heard my little diatribe, in fact. I believe that we, the people, have a right to live more or less campaign free for most of our lives. I don't believe it's necessary for a campaign to extend out two years before the election. On the contrary, I believe it disrupts the process of the government currently in power.
Therefore, I propose, in all earnestness, that we put strict limitations on when campaigns can go public. They can put together their committees, they can raise their funds privately, they can get the mechanics of a campaign machine together whenever they wish.
Furthermore, I believe it would be beneficial to have all of the parties (not just the big two, but all of them,) discuss, as a full party, what their platforms may be, and allow for input and discussion by their constituents, so that the ultimate party platforms, in fact, represent the ideas and wishes of the majority of their supporters, rather than the ideology of a fringe group on the outer edges that will serve no one but the small minority who supplied it.
Therefore, I would propose the following measures, to make the process more reasonable and less demanding on everyone, especially the voters.
First, I strongly believe the individuals should be limited in time frame from all this campaigning, particularly if they are elected currently to a post at the national or statewide level. In fact, I propose that campaigns should be limited in their widespread campaigning to the six weeks prior to the pertinent election, or, in the case of the presidential candidates, six weeks prior to their respective party conventions, and phone calls of any kind should simply be outlawed.
I also feel very strongly that federal level primaries should be nationwide, six weeks prior to the party conventions, which should be held in conjunction with each other, and should be just as the national elections, both parties, all candidates listed, on the same day. I don't feel that the quirky voters in Iowa or New Hampshire represent my ideas or opinions, and too many solid candidates are eliminated on the basis of whims that have nothing to do with the ability to govern this land.
In addition, negative campaigns should be strictly illegal, and those who use such tactics should be prosecuted for slander or liable, and the fines should be extremely severe. I do not want to hear someone's interpretation of their opponent's point of view. I can read, I can hear, and I can think for myself. Instead, tell me what YOU will do, how you will accomplish it, and what it will mean to me, the average person who will be affected by the grand plans you are making.
The freedom of speech proponents (my own son among them, no doubt,) will probably cry foul at the idea that campaigns will be stifled. In fact, I feel that the current system has silenced true discovery in favor of Fear Factor style reality television. We no longer know what our candidate will do, instead we know what they think of their opponent's ideas. Perhaps it is a conspiracy on the part of the candidates so they don't have to come up with their own ideas, I don't know. But I am in favor of substance, and I am not feeling patient about it any more.
This is an occasion where history will be made. We expect record breaking turn-outs, and participation is at an all time high. For the first time in my memory, young people, the 18-25 crowd, are excited and engaged in the process, and they are voting in record breaking numbers.
There are those who feel that our young people shouldn't have a large voice, because they are too inconsequential to understand the implications of their decision. I disagree. I think the youth are the ones who truly need to make their voices heard, because it is they who will ultimately have to pay the price for the decisions that are made today.
I welcome them with open arms, and additionally, I welcome all the immigrants who have become citizens in the last four years and who will cast a vote for the very first time. Whatever brought you to our land, I hope that the opportunity you have today to be a part of the process will not stop with one piece of paper, but will be transmitted to whatever part of the globe you formerly called home.
Please tell your friends, your family, your connections who remain wherever you started your life journey, about the thrill of helping to choose who will lead not only the United States, but in a very real way, the world, into the next four years. And tell them, too, what it is like to do so in an environment where the greatest election crime of the day is not death threats, but the distribution of Starbucks, to induce people to get to the polls.
I encourage you, whatever your persuasions, to get out and participate in democracy in action today. Do it for those who have fought defending the right. Do it for our children and the future. Most of all, do it for yourself, so that you will know, whatever the outcome, you have a right to complain because you participated.
I leave you with the extremely brief, but always compelling, and still surprisingly pertinent words of Abraham Lincoln, delivered on the battle field at Gettysburg, on November 19, 1863:
"Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.
"Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battle-field of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field, as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.
"But, in a larger sense, we can not dedicate -- we can not consecrate -- we can not hallow -- this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us -- that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion -- that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain -- that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom -- and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth."
