Election Day is Almost Here

This election has been, by far, the ugliest, mud-slingingest Presidential election that I can recall in modern times (since I've been voting!) I'm not suggesting that politicians haven't disliked, or even despised, each other in past elections, but the level at which it has become personal, and the degree to which the candidates, rather than their surrogates, have participated in the vitriol is surely a new thing.

Politics has always been an us-vs.-them game, with occasional brief flashes of cooperation or bipartisanship. But I believe that the current nastiness can be traced back to the mid-nineties and Newt Gingrich. Gingrich was on a mission to unseat the Democrats as the majority party in both houses of Congress and to render President Bill Clinton ineffective. Newt's strategy was to, not only pursue the usual within-the-system tactics, but to use the power of television, then in the form of CSPAN. He made his attacks personal. Coupled with the rise of conservative talk radio, politics became trench warfare. And Democrats didn't forget, George W. Bush was vilified in just as vicious a fashion as Clinton was; if it wasn't for the unifying effect of the 9-11 attacks, I suspect that it would have been worse. Under Barack Obama it got even worse. Republicans made it their reason for existence to block everything that he attempted to accomplish.

But this contest has exceeded all previous measures of incivility. One candidate, Donald Trump, started his primary campaign with hate and insults. Substituting demeaning nicknames for his opponents in lieu of presenting a rational case for why he was the better candidate. He continued into the general election, insulting not only Hillary Clinton, but multiple segments of the population. Hillary Clinton, who likes to repeat Michelle Obama's call to "when they go low, we go high", nevertheless got down in the mud with Trump, even calling many of his supporters deplorable.

But what's depressing is that most of the electorate is ignorant, and makes their decisions based, not on any objective facts, but on sound bites, slogans, Facebook memes, and what their friends say. The insult-driven campaign works because most people won't go any deeper. Once they hear something that they want to hear, they need to hear no more, they need to research no further, they need not question their position.