No Representation Without Agitation

Elections bring out the worst in me. They are a palimpsest of conflict. Layered on top of the internecine battles between Democrats, among Republicans and the ultimate intramural between the two parties is the conflict I have with myself, between the boy who cuts his teeth on competition and the mature man who ought to see beyond it.

In election years, I cannot resist the spectacle of victory and defeat, even though I admit it is better for everyone to cooperate than to compete. Like all addictions, my need for political combat comes at a price. Elections reintroduce me to the features of my fellow human that I find most regressive and resistant to change. I receive a triple-dose of the mass psychology of my fellow humans--the sloganeering and campaign buttons, the swelling crowds hanging on every aspirational word and cheering reflexively the same platitudes they have heard for years, like fans at a Golden Oldies concert. But the worst irritant of the presidential election seasons is, perhaps unbelievably, the most rational one. Our presidential elections force me to confront the inherent constitutional ambiguities surrounding the presidency. I find myself wondering what the president does or can do in our government and what the fuss ultimately is all about.

If the oracle of Delphi were still in business she would tell me that I will never attain true wisdom until I renounce my juvenile interest in box scores and other trivial applications of arithmetic and statistics. I must stop scouring the sports pages for results of games contested between teams I have never seen and with which I have absolutely no connection. This preoccupation with competition results and numbers first surfaced when I was five and awoke to the thud of the morning newspaper landing on the door mat. I would peel the sports section from the rest of the paper and pore over box scores with fascination, although I had never attended a game.

This passion for abstract results of far-off events prompts me to forage for information about the presidential election and wonder which candidate will carry on. I even congratulate my prescience of months ago for accurately predicting a certain candidate's resurgence. Such efforts lead to more ambitious ones until speculations spin out of control. Suddenly, I am handicapping upcoming primaries--for both parties--and setting up a hypothetical general election for which I have predicted the outcome. Although I am in suspense over the particular course of this election, I have calculated according to arcane equations who the next nominee will be for the party that loses in 2008.

My fascination with presidential elections might qualify as pathological since beneath it all lies a reservoir of ambivalence about politics, government, and their impact on most everyday lives. I deeply distrust the political process, candidates, and media coverage because the elections are more spectacle than civic necessity and the candidates are more like actors than public servants, promoted by a shadowy consortium of political operatives, strategists, and contributors. The process is veiled in mystery and conducted with the stagecraft of presentation and concealment. Like Mayer, Warner and Zanuck of the Hollywood studio system, today's political operatives forge candidates, myth by myth. And because the election is packaged as a hybrid of entertainment and sport, I am more like an audience member than an information-seeking citizen. Candidates spend more time and effort manipulating and distorting their opponents' positions than promulgating their own, and ultimately I follow and get lost in the moves rather than accrue a base of knowledge.

Instinctively, I do not believe that presidential candidates will keep their promises. It disturbs me that they continue to make them. They are after all shrewd professionals who know they will not or cannot realize the collective wishes they espouse. Of course, promises are to a political candidate what love is to a popular songwriter. No politician can avoid them and expect to win. However, the talent our presidential candidates demonstrate for spewing empty promises without a twitch of guilt or a smile of irony is amazing. This is probably due to a state of protective, temporary denial or selective amnesia-a politician's special gift--the survival mechanism without which they cannot function.

This is how it works. When candidates make promises they are sincerely stating their wishes, while shrewdly suppressing their knowledge that such wishes cannot come true, not due to any defect of their own but because of the world we live in. Since they did not create the world, they can take no responsibility when it squashes their best intentions later on. So they continue to make promises without compunctions and "fight the good fight" without appreciable effect.

Politics is a secular world, and presidential candidates are as close to prophets as a social science can spawn. They are charged with providing hope. Although I know they are doing their job by telling us beautiful lies, it rankles me when I hear a political candidate promise to bring jobs back from overseas. How can a president do this within the framework of the constitution? Will he as president stage a hostile takeover of every corporation that farms out jobs overseas? Does he believe that presidential powers can reach into the boardrooms of multinational corporations, in particular the same ones contributing generously to his campaign?

Election time requires a long and willing suspension of disbelief. In order to enjoy it, you almost need to convince yourself that it is a board game or a fantasy. For a few months or years--the election season has expanded to fill the vacuum of our routinized lives--we pretend that somebody supported by millions of dollars in special interest money will change the lives of the hundreds of millions of people who are desperate for something good to happen to them. The huddled masses who suffer from overwork and under-love, from injuries, diseases and the health care costs required to treat them, from loss of husbands, wives, children to war, seek the messianic figure who will wave a wand and relieve them of all of their problems. It is a time of mass appeal and mass hysteria and it confounds me. Do the thousands who wait for hours to attend political rallies believe that any candidate can fulfill their longings or make an iota of difference in their lives? Or is this moment of anticipation reward enough? They seem to be standing there, whispering the words of Captain Kirk, "Beam me up, Obama!

This year's mantra of change is a case in point. The possibility of change is the essence of open, free elections, so it stuns me that a candidate can claim "change" as a campaign theme. The election of any of the candidates from either party would constitute a change since the incumbent president is leaving. Yet, because change is a word buzzing in millions of voters' heads every candidate tries to own it--or at least to time-share, it. So the contest assumes a new side-bar: which candidate represents the greatest change. My daughter devised an ingenious formula to determine who deserves consideration as the greatest agent of change. Since Barak Obama is half-black and Hillary Clinton is all woman, electing her would effect the greatest change. It sounds like a logic question on the SATs, doesn't it? Ridiculous, perhaps, but when you make change an issue it takes you down the path of petty distinctions that lead nowhere.

It is probably unfair to blame presidential candidates for dispensing empty panaceas. Or to chide the electorate be for electing a president using the criteria reserved for American Idol. The entire mess is due to the historical circumstances in which our nation started. When we separated from Great Britain we decapitated the traditional head of government--the monarch--and had no alternative model to replace it. The presidency is an embryonic, sketchy concept for a head of government. It is a collocation of powers including military leadership (commander-in-chief), foreign affairs, signing legislation into law, and administration of government. A president can inspire and prod by using the "bully pulpit" to promulgate policies, but can bring no laws into effect. He can dispatch soldiers to distant lands without formal declarations of war, but Congress is ultimately the branch that drafts and passes laws and makes budgets. In this scheme, the president is one largely symbolic cog.

Of course, it doesn't have to be this way. Look at Canada. It has a parliament with a prime minister who is not directly elected but is the head of parliament, leading legislation. Fusing the legislature and administration in this way makes for a more effective form of government, not nearly as confrontational and divisive as our own. When the electorate wants change they know how to get it top to bottom by sweeping out the ruling party, not peacemeal the way we do it in the United States. It makes one wonder what would have been if we had not fought the war of independence. Would we have adopted the parliamentary system of Great Britain and had a government like Canada's? If that had come to pass, we would currently have universal health care and no war in Iraq.

We may wish that the president can fix everything in our lives, but he or she is more important to us as a symbol of our aspirations. It is no coincidence that the same privacy exists in the movie theater, the voting booth, and the living room. We vote our dreams. The presidential elections, in which we choose a powerful figurehead, answers emotional needs, not a rational direction for government and society. The power to vote is not about obtaining concrete results, but participating in the pleasure of symbolic choice.

Ultimately, my grievance against presidential elections has nothing to do with our political system per se or the candidates. My problem is internal. Elections compel me to look inward and confront an internal paradox--the childish fixation on box scores and political outcomes against the mature wisdom that says it is a waste of precious time. After all, government, even at its best, cannot solve the most important problems in our lives, never could, never will.