Was Our Vote
for the People, or the Party?
By Jeanette Henderson
One of the many
beauties of the American democratic system is that
when we cast our vote on Nov. 7, we chose individuals,
candidates who had his or her own line on the ballot.
It wasn’t a vote for an institution or a political
party (even if we voted a straight party line),
our votes were for individuals. Whether we were
voting for one person or against another doesn’t
matter, only that we voted for individuals.
The reason we choose individuals is because people
trust people, because our candidates can look us
in the eye and we can judge their believability
by the way they communicate with us on a one-on-one
basis. We choose them because he or she has assured
us more convincingly than their opponent throughout
their campaign that they better understand us and
our needs, and will go to Washington (or the state
or local government) to help us have those needs
satisfied. The problem is, once they win, they seem
to disappear into some large, onerous and untouchable
vacuum, never to be seen or heard again (until the
next election).
Just look at what we’ve seen in the first
week. We delivered our winners their victories,
and they left Wednesday morning, poised and ready
to satisfy our personal needs. Once the candidate
wins, however, the party suddenly swoops in and
takes credit for that victory and scores of others
across the country, whether they deserve it or not.
The party patently paints every winner with the
same party brush. The party starts spewing its party
line (which often contradicts what our candidate
said during his/her campaign), and the individuals
we voted for disappear behind a curtain of party
politics, party ideals, and party obligations. We
no longer have anyone to look in the eye and believe
anymore. We individuals don’t trust institutions
or parties, we only trust people.
Granted, we knew our candidates belonged to a party,
but many of us don’t, or we vote across party
lines in order to vote for an individual we like
or respect. Once the election is over, however,
suddenly that individual is gone, and only The Party
remains. This is the mistake every political machine
makes; they forget the individual. They forget that
the candidate is an individual, and they forget
the voters are individuals.
That’s the unseen uphill battle for every
Party once they gain power, and the cycle seems
unbreakable. First, Party leaders assume that because
the voters elected enough individuals on one side
of the "center" to give them power, they
intentionally interpret that as a mandate to try
to swing the entire country as far to that side
as possible. The party loads all of its individuals
weight together, whether they agree with the party
or not, and under that weight, the pendulum swings
one way.
Once it goes too far (as it invariably and inevitably
does), the voters stop the swing by voting for enough
individuals on the other side of center to give
the opposing party power, who then misinterprets
that as a mandate, loads all of its individual winners
together (whether they agree with their party or
not), and try to swing the entire country as far
as possible to their side. The pendulum swings the
other way.
The problem is, there is no mandate, or more accurately,
the only mandate is to stay in the middle. In the
middle is where most of us individual Americans
feel most comfortable, and that’s where we
want to stay.
We vote for an individual because we believe that
individual is like us, and that he or she will go
to Washington and address our personal needs. They’ve
looked us in the eye and told us so.
Once they’ve won, however, and all we have
to listen to are the spoutings of the Party leadership
saying how much they’re going to move away
from the center, we start to become confused, then
angry. Having been flush with the exhilaration of
going to the polls to participate in our great democracy
despite the inconvenience of time and weather, within
days our hopes are dashed as our candidate disappears
into the sunset. Is it any wonder barely half of
eligible voters bother?
The only solution is for the great monolithic political
parties to recognize and remember the individual
after the election. All these speeches about being
"bi-partisan" only remind us that our
individual candidates have disappeared behind the
party curtain, and any hopes we had of staying in
the middle are quickly becoming pipe dreams. We
already see the two behemoths posturing, claiming
they’ll all get along when we know that it
is impossible for these two leopards to change their
spots. It’s just a matter of time before someone
takes the first shot and blames the other one for
it. We individuals are already anticipating the
time when we will have to go back the other way,
to keep the pendulum as close to the middle as possible.
The first party that learns to effectively communicate
that it is a party of individuals with individual
ideas and individual responsibilities, rather than
absorbing all of its candidates into its one-sided
mindset that has little agenda other than to oppose
the one-sided mindset of the other party, the party
that appears to always put the needs of the individual
voter first, before the needs of the party or its
leadership, the party that recognizes that being
in the middle is where the majority of Americans
want to be, and that it is all the majority the
party needs to win, will be the one who holds power
the longest.
Whether the Democrats or the Republicans can let
go of their decades of institutionalized political
machinery in order to accomplish this, or whether
some yet to be created Middle of the Road Party
will need to be started in order to do so is anyone’s
guess. What is certain is that when a need exists,
somebody always comes along to satisfy it, and right
now, this country needs leaders who can communicate
to the individual effectively. Keep your eyes open,
we need to find them before it’s too late.
(Jeanette Henderson is author of the book ‘There’s
No Such Thing as Public Speaking’ to be released
by Penguin Books later this year. A writer, speaker,
speech coach, teacher, presentation consultant and
Special Correspondent for the radio talk show Viewpoints
on WCPI-FM in Middle Tennessee, she is co-founder
of Podium Master, a nationally-recognized presentation
consulting firm. She may be contacted through www.podiummaster.com)
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