WHY DO WE BEAT UP ON OUR PRESIDENTS AND ELECTED POLITICIANS SO MUCH?

WHY DO WE BEAT UP ON OUR PRESIDENTS AND ELECTED POLITICIANS SO MUCH?

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© October 31, 2010 (HALLOWEEN)

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In 1964, I was a young manager in the Industrial Division of Nalco Chemical Company. I was a very active lad which was somewhat foreign to my disposition: Secretary of the Zoning Board of Lawrence Township of Marion County (Indianapolis), on the Executive Board of Power Engineering, member of the American Chemical Association, columnist for the Lawrence Township newspaper, contributor to the Catholic Messenger, and chairman of the Young Republicans of Marion county.

It was in that role that I dined and discussed politics with Republican candidates for the House of Representative, Senate, Governor, and the candidacy of Barry Goldwater for President of the United States. Senator Goldwater’s son came to head up a rally we had for him, along with a series of appearances across the country. Alas, I did not meet his father.

It was in that climate that I experienced a sense of how brutal politics can be, how irrational and mendacious. People around me thought the world would go to hell if Lyndon Baines Johnson was elected president, while the nimble vice president and now president (due to the assassination of John Fitzgerald Kennedy) was claiming Goldwater would create a nuclear holocaust in Vietnam.

The scare tactics worked. Johnson won in a landslide.

Looking now, a half-century later, that time was child’s play compared to today. It was, however, very much like Halloween during the whole campaign with the attendant vitriolic, ghoulish, macabre and morbid caricatures of the “enemy’s list,” which was those running for office of the other party.

The thing I remember most about these candidates was that sitting across from them in someone’s house in the kitchen having a cup of coffee they invariably dropped their scary masks and were decent human beings. But once out on the stump, their sleeping Frankenstein rose out of their bowles with fire in their eyes and hot air out of their mouths.

In that sense, if anything, fifty years has seen this disposition of the satanic and the saintly transmogrify into the grotesque. After the extended Halloween of mid-term elections next Tuesday, November 2, 2010, new bodies and many old will fill the House of Representatives and the Senate, but otherwise, it will seem as if nothing has changed. So much for spending a half billion dollars on political campaigning in our democracy. So late we are smart.

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