This week has been busy and I haven’t had as much time to write as I had hoped, but I do have time for one more post on the "Biggest Obstacles to Electing the Right President" project.

Earlier this week I wrote about how political news is produced and consumed more like entertainment coverage and gossip than serious news.   I still stand behind that position but a few other posts have inspired me to write about another issue that Brian mentioned the other day and that was a theme in Tiffany’s entry.

Tiffany is right; despite such a low percentage of eligible citizens turning out at the polls, we have too many voters.  Wikipedia describes voting this way:  "Voting is a method of decision making wherein a group such as a meeting or an electorate attempts to gauge its opinion—usually as a final step following discussions or debates."   I like that definition better than most dictionary definitions that focus on the act of filling in a ballot or pulling a lever as voting.  There is so much more that must happen first.  Wikipedia’s inclusion of "usually as a final step following discussions or debates" is critical to understand what has gone wrong with the US electoral system.

We no longer have any real discussion or debate in our election system.   We have a surplus of single issue voters and that is the crux of the problem.  When you hear the term "the base" as in Republicans must get out the base to win this election you should mentally translate that the Republicans need to poke a stick at the sore spots that matter to their party members.  In 2004, the campaign ads claiming that a vote for Kerry meant a surrender in the "war on terror" had this effect.  

In November of 2004, eleven states had ballot measures where voters could vote for state constitutional amendments codifying marriage as an exclusively heterosexual institution. Getting Arkansas, Georgia, Kentucky, Michigan, Mississippi, Montana, North Dakota, Ohio, Oklahoma, Oregon and Utah’s voters out to the polls based on these measures benefited Bush and the Republicans immensely.  Same-sex marriage, like abortion, or immigration, or gun control is an issue that will draw people out to vote who would have otherwise stayed home.  If we have any hope of salvaging our republic we, as voters, need to make a supreme act of will and stop letting campaigns and parties press our buttons.  

Yesterday, I did an informal poll among my co-workers to determine what single issue they would find most difficult to ignore in selecting a candidate.  The idea was to see what we could take off the table for, say twenty years while we tried to fix wider issues that are less emotional but affect more people.  The people I asked, three women, and one man, all between 25 and 35 years old, all settled on the Abortion controversy as a make or break issue for them.   For two of them, both women, it was an instant decision.  They decided that even if they agreed with a candidate’s position on most other issues, if they disagreed on this one issue, it would change their vote.

I came of voting age well after Roe v. Wade and all my voting life, the one thing I usually know about a candidate is their position on abortion - often that is all I knew.  As a life long Democrat, I’ve watched my party use the issue of abortion and the threat of changes to the Roe v. Wade world as a way to bring out voters.  I’ve seen the Republican do the same thing on the same issue, as well as on the issue of same-sex marriage, and immigration.

As  gay man, same-sex marriage laws actually affect me.  Brian and I traveled to Vermont in 2001 to have a civil ceremony.  It doesn’t mean anything legally here in Pennsylvania, but it was important to us.  Despite the fact that it matters a great deal to me.  I am going to make an effort to not let that issue overshadow other issues in my selection of a candidate.

If enough people did that, we could actually elect people who can address the issues that affect the nation as a whole instead of special voting blocks.  Divide and conquer has been a very successful tactic on the part of both the Republican and Democratic parties for at least as long as I have been able to vote and it only works with the cooperation of us voters.   I don’t believe that voters in the US have the desire or the will to look past the big hot button issues, but I can dream.

If we want politicians to set aside their differences and work together for the good of the nation, we voters need to set a good example for them.  If we want to make voting the end result of true discussions or debates on the issues we have to go into those discussions and debates before we have made our decisions based on a single issue.