The 2012 election provided plenty of reasons to celebrate, Barack Obama’s re-election only one of them. A record number of women in the Senate. The first openly gay Senator. A House of Representatives with more Latinos, more Asian-Americans, three new openly gay members….
Also worth celebrating: the stunning dedication of voters, some of whom stood in line for six hours – until 1 o’clock in the morning – continuing to stand and wait even though the election’s outcome was clear. In areas hit by Hurricane Sandy, storm-traumatized people found their way to makeshift voting precincts and voted. By candlelight.
Wonderful, wonderful stuff.
But the election also left some very troublesome debris. Among the problems: the amount of money spent on campaigns. It’s a hoot that the efforts of Karl Rove, Sheldon Adelson, and the like bore so little fruit. But that’s in part because Democrats and their supporters spent plenty of money themselves. The money that went into campaign advertising was unconscionable, and there’s little reason to hope for change.
Second: this was the ugliest campaign I can remember. We might dismiss the pronouncements of people like Donald Trump, but Mitt Romney’s lies weren’t coming from the fringe. Nor, locally, were the direct-mail pieces aimed at Democrat Ted O’Brien, painting a decent, honorable man as siding with people who sexually abuse women and children.
But a third problem may be more serious, and will be harder to overcome: that is the deep, deep division in the country. The scene captured by television cameras at the Romney and Obama Election Night rallies in Boston and Chicago said it all.
The Romney supporters were almost exclusively middle-aged and older. And white. The people cheering and crying in McCormick Center in Chicago were young, old, black, Hispanic, Asian, white….
This, of course, is how the vote broke.
America is a multi-racial, multi-cultural nation – in some places. The red-blue voter map seems to get more startling with each new election. With a few exceptions, the blue states flank the shores of the Atlantic (north of the Mason-Dixon line) and Pacific Oceans. Except for the Midwestern cities, the vast expanse of the interior and southern United States is heavily red. And even in solidly blue states like New York, get very far out from the cities and you’re in red country.
We are a nation at once diverse and segregated, a nation that both prides itself on its melting-potted nature and fears it. This is not new, nor is the outright hatred that some Americans feel for others. But it is a serious problem, and it will make it more difficult for the president and Congress to face the enormous challenges that are ahead. Wealth disparity, infrastructure decay, education, climate change, energy, health care: a divided nation can’t deal successfully with these.
Shortly after midnight on Election Night, columnist Eugene Robinson, an African American, posted this on the Washington Post website:
“The GOP and Mitt Romney ran a campaign designed to capture a huge share of a shrinking segment of the electorate: white men. Sorry to be so blunt, but that’s the demographic Republicans tried to capture, with their incessant talk of ‘taking the country back’ and their long-running attempt to portray Obama as somehow alien and threatening.”
“Note to the GOP: It’s our country, too,” Robinson wrote. “And no, you can’t have it back. We all have to share.”
There ought to be a way to reach all but the most extreme in this divided nation. We ought to be able to celebrate our diversity rather than fear it. But the divisions we saw in the 2012 election campaign, and the intractableness we’re seeing among House conservatives in these early post-election days, show us how tough it will be to move forward.
If Barack Obama can pull most of us together, if he can use his immense oratorical skills to point the way to common ground, it could be an accomplishment that dwarfs anything else he does in eight years.
This article appears in Nov 14-20, 2012.
To the victor the spoils, including the right to decide which side’s talking points were “lies” and which gospel. Nevertheless, it is the height of hypocrisy to ignore the fact that the heart of the Obama/Axelrod strategy was a filthy gutter campaign of lies, smears, and slander meant to destroy Gov. Romney—one of the most capable and decent men to seek the presidency in our lifetimes. And for the record, no, Gov. Romney’s honorable campaign returned nothing of the kind.
Of course, with no record to run on, Obama and Axelrod had no alternative but to go ugly, which they did in an unprecedented fashion, as you note. Besides suppressing turnout for Gov. Romney, the other leg of their strategy was to double down on wedge issues and divisive hard left rhetoric, with a focus on methodically turning out the extremist base in “firewall” states. Thus Obama managed to become the only president to eke out a second term with less support than the first.
In light of that campaign strategy, it is simply preposterous to suggest that Obama is in any position to “pull most of us together” or “point the way to common ground”.
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Strident and unthinkingly partisan commentary is par for the course for Eugene Robinson, but you quote a lie of his that is beyond the pale. It is simply a lie that during this campaign there was “incessant talk of ‘taking the country back'”. Robinson seems to be confusing 2012 with 2004, when Howard Dean adopted that slogan as his campaign theme. Of course, it was perfectly acceptable to liberals then, because the shoe was on the other foot.
It’s all of a piece with the obsessive need for liberals to congratulate themselves endlessly on their supposed superiority to the rest of us benighted mortals. Their delusions would be amusing if they were not so pathological—and hazardous to a free people.
According to exit polls, more than one in ten black men voted for Romney. Perhaps some of them would like to say to Robinson, “It’s our country, too.”
Wow. you really hate white males.
The barackobama.com website asks his supporters to complete a post-election survey and identify themselves as part of certain “constituency groups.” There are 22 groups to choose from: African-Americans, Arab Americans, Latinos, Youth, LGBT, women etc. However, there are no choices available for “white” or “Caucasian.”
Enough said.
Why is it so bad that money was spent? The money goes straight back into the American economy, most of it is given by wealthy people, and ends up paying for middle class jobs such as the advertising industry and small businesses who make posters and bumper stickers. So I say spend even more next time!
And who cares if we’re divided? I want different things than the next guy wants. Just because someone voted for Mitt, doesn’t mean he/she hates minorities.
Your article is well written but it says nothing.