Presidential Campaign

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Baiting for Votes

You can see it when athletes talk trash and try to get undisciplined opponents to foul out or get penalized. You can see it when ISIL publishes propaganda about the weakness and immorality of Western governments. And you can see it when Republican candidates for President stir up their voting base with ill-defined demands to step up the war against Islam.

It’s tough rhetoric, but it serves only to bait the opposition and inspire fear. It has no strategic value, except to stir up anger toward a broadly defined enemy, to inspire the kind of prejudice that feeds anxiety and the need to strike back.

In an election year we accept that the opposition party is playing its role as agitator, creating the unrest and uncertainty that wins them votes. Americans want quick answers to terrorism and wish for a world where a few well-place bombs can eliminate a threat. But this is the essence of demagoguery, baiting for votes.

Of course we feel anxious when two unsuspected Muslim citizens suddenly lash out and kill fourteen innocent people. There is no predicting the sudden outbursts of terror like this. It has the hallmarks of insanity. You feel like your neighbors could be psychopaths. That’s why we call it “terror.”

To use that fear to harvest votes for the Presidential nomination is unconscionable. It arouses suspicion, prejudice and hate to the level of hysteria. No elected office is worth the price of this fear-mongering. You can be critical of the administration without working citizens into a froth about immigrants and using the word “Islamic” to name the enemy.

America has to be strategic at this moment, not blindly swinging like a drunk in a barroom brawl. Not looking for the closest victim to attack, instead of gathering allies against the real enemy. This is a war like no other, but we could have learned something from the first blundering into Iraq seeking weapons of mass destruction. You don’t shoot first and ask questions later. That’s for Dirty Harry and Dick Cheney.

Fear-baiting ought to be condemned and dismissed as a campaign strategy. It’s deceitful, unethical, and unpatriotic.

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Rush Week

This is the nation’s biggest “Rush Week,” the week before the willing and the gullible are inducted into the voter fraternity.  It is no exaggeration to compare the wooing of the eligible voter to the seasonal Rush on college fraternities and sororities, except this Rush is not selective. It beckons every registered voter to its side of the ballot.

A word of caution about “the Rush.”  During Rush Week, fraternities have a plan to attract the most worthy by closeting the least worthy. Because, despite some of the most elitist policies in a democratic society, fraternities always seem to have a few embarrassing members, the ones they sadly disparage as the “nerds,” the “geeks,” or the “turkeys.”   Traditionally these potential embarrassments get “movie money” to abandon the house during Rush parties, so the recruits never suspect what manner of fraternity brother they will encounter if they join the fraternity. I have no idea if fraternities still stoop to this practice, but I know it is occurring right now in the Republican Presidential Campaign.

While Mitt Romney is gliding to the center of the political spectrum, his Tea Party brothers and sisters have become invisible, or at least inaudible, in the media. They are buttoning their lips while the nominee gives ground to a woman’s right to choose, the need to expand health insurance, the protection of Medicare and Medicaid, the preservation of college loans, and the peace-making role of the U.S. in the Middle East.  If the Party nominee had let these hedged positions slip during the Primary season, he would have been drummed out of the fraternity.

But the “Tea-keys” of the Republican Party have graciously stepped out the back door of the frat house during the Rush.  While their nominee has implied that he will go after tax deductions at the upper level of income, they have stopped their ears and held their tongues.  They know the rules of the Rush: let the Chairman do his job and don’t meddle with success.

In the weeks leading up to the big Rush, a couple of gobblers squawked out of turn in Indiana and Missouri. They apparently did not get the message that conservative discourse had been suspended.  Fortunately the brothers cornered them in the pantry and convinced them to revise and apologize before they drove the recruits screaming from the house with their unauthorized convictions. The Chairman also declared he would have none of their misogynist mutterings.  He didn’t kick them out, but he did give them movie tickets for a month of openings.

After the Rush, the “unmentionables” always return, and the fraternity carries on like nothing happened.  Except the once-invisible members now have the run of the house. They might even be officers in charge of things.  In actual fraternities it hardly matters, because the brothers don’t influence the cost of tuition or the distributing of scholarships.  They just plan parties, organize fund-raisers and promote camaraderie.

Not in the nation’s House.  The faithful of the Tea Party will stalk the halls of Congress, declaring their non-negotiable positions.  They will bully the freshmen and threaten the moderate upper-classmen until the Party line is solid and inviolable.   Their rules will be the House rules.

This is the fraternity that is courting the American voter this Rush week, an affable and welcoming group, whose most dogmatic and recalcitrant members are lurking in the closet, waiting for the Rush to be over.  They are confident of their clout, once their guy is in the White House, and they know nothing has been promised that they can’t circumvent.

The question for us, the prospective pledges, to answer is, Can we live with all the members of this fraternity–even the closeted ones? Are we comfortable with the likes of the Republican Primary candidates, the ones who cried ‘no amnesty’ for all undocumented residents and who denied a woman’s right to choose under any circumstances?  Are we going to join on the basis of a handshake from the smiling Chair of Rush Week?

Ever since “The Revenge of the Nerds” we have learned to respect the outliers, the ones we used to closet. They turned out to be our bosses or our formidable competition.  Likewise no one should underestimate the power of the closeted ones after the 2012 election.