Everywhere you go in the U.S. (and in many other countries) one of the most common topics is the presidential campaign of Donald Trump. Whether you love or hate him, whether you think he’s a tyrant or a saint, it’s worth thinking about just how out of proportion our interest in any president is, and how our rabid support for largely meaningless parties divides us as a nation.
In the 2008 election, Obama and McCain (most of you are probably wondering who that is) were so obviously unevenly matched that the race could hardly even be considered one. Obama had Oprah campaigning for him, proclaiming that he was, “… the one!” (whatever that means); people made songs and chants in support of him, some of them bordering on religiously obsessive; and he was inflated in the public eye to be nearly divine (someone actually made a small statuette of him with a neon halo labelled “blessing”).
During all of this, the political right was demonizing Obama (sometimes quite literally, there were a good number of people who thought he was the Anti-Christ) and saying he would bring about a communist takeover of America or worse. Furious fulminations fired against him almost constantly, from the reasonable claims of inexperience (he hadn’t even been a senator for a full term), to the irrational (see Anti-Christ, above).
All of this, both praise and condemnation, turned out to be just hot-air. Obama has certainly doubled the national debt, but that was likely to occur regardless of who the president was, just as how Bush doubled the debt during his tenure. His Affordable Care Act was not a spectacular success but neither has it ended with death panels, so no one really gained ground with that. Even his policy in Iraq and Afghanistan (while perhaps not as well defined as one would like) has been essentially a hold-over from Bush’s days, so nothing has really changed there either. Overall, Obama has shaped out to be a pretty average modern president, neither saint nor demon.
Of course, no one has retained the memory of the lambasting and glorification of the current president. All has been forgotten in order to prepare for almost the exact same spectacle. Trump and Clinton are not on even playing fields; when everyone is talking about a particular candidate, that’s a good sign that they will obliterate the opposition, and seeing as how no one talks about Clinton except to say they’d rather vote for her (always ruefully, like they can’t vote for anyone else) than for Trump, this is not an encouraging rallying cry. In fact, it’s almost the exact same thing Sean Hannity said about McCain and Obama when McCain was running for president, and look what happened there. Resignation does not equal exuberance (obviously), and the opposition to Trump, while certainly vehement in their hatred of the absolute indescribable evil for which he stands, is so loathe to support Clinton that the most they can say is that they’d rather have her than Trump. Nothing to excite or bolster support, just petty whining.
In the end, it doesn’t matter who wins. Trump will likely defeat Clinton, but I may be wrong and Clinton might become president instead, but all things considered, whoever we “win” as a commander-in-chief, we will have lost as a nation. Our constant need to slander the opposition makes compromise impossible; after all, how can you make a deal with someone you have just called the devil, and feel good about it? We need to rein in our desire to hurl garbage at each other, and approach the issues of our time more levelly, because in the end, presidents come and go, but our fear of civility and negotiation (and its repercussions) will linger on long after everyone has forgotten the name Trump. Our republic was founded on the assumption that the citizenry could make informed decisions and compromise for the greater good of the nation, but who wants to compromise with someone they hate?
