Thursday, November 01, 2007
This is a guest essay written by Zach Schonfeld who will be eligible to vote for president for the first time next year. Send in your essays to be included on this site to Zibblu@GMail.com"Fear and.. Voting(??) on the Election Trail"
The 55th Presidential Election is coming up next year and one can already smell the storm brewing. Sure, Newsweek and Time don’t shy away from a shiny, cover picture of the ‘08 Candidate of the Week when it’s a slow week for news, but I seem to anticipate the election more than others: see, my eighteenth birthday comes on October 2nd; the election’s slated for the fourth of November. There’s an eerily convenient twist in there. Yes, I’ll be among the few students at my school hittin` up the polls in ’08 (current Seniors will be gone, of course) amid the grumbles of my friends who miss the cut by mere months, sentenced to another four years of powerlessness.
Truthfully, even if I were wholly apathetic to the election’s outcome (I’m not), I’d still enter that voting booth and savagely choose buttons at random (I won’t) for the sake of it. Plus, I’m told it’s a whole lot of fun pulling that lever to close the curtain. But this isn’t meant as a patriotic “Vote or Die!” bumper sticker, nor is it a motivational call-to-arms against those cynics who condemn the whole affair because “one vote won’t make a difference.” I can’t convince you that New York is a “swing state”. And what would it matter? You, dear reader, may not even be of voting age. Ha!
The frustration I felt in ’04 was enormous. Naturally, it was the first election I’d actively followed or cared about. That autumn was filled with heated political arguments, even a viewing of Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11. Come Election Day, I was stuck in neutral, a claustrophobic, useless being, unable to participate in that famed democratic recipe. No, my hypothetical vote wouldn’t have changed the outcome. Yes, Bush won that election because of the Democratic Party’s stunning inability to demonstrate that Kerry even had a pulse, much less a personality.
But still. The image that most represents the ’04 election to me is one that took place in the Seven Bridges School library after school on November 3rd. A fellow student had just read the news of Kerry’s concession and expressed his disappointment by banging his head on a hard library desk. Over and over. I watched. “Four more years!” Something tells me that if I vote in ’08, I won’t have to see any kids banging their heads on a desk.
It was Bill Clinton who once said, “If ever there was a doubt about the importance of exercising the most fundamental right of citizenship, it was clearly answered by the first presidential election of the 21st century.” Here’s another angle for you: my parents’ votes in every election of the past 10-20 years have simply canceled each other out. You won’t need a graphing calculator to see that three isn’t an even number.
The ’08 Election will be an unpredictable one whether or not I vote. For starters, it’s the first election since ’28 without any incumbents in the primaries. Secondly, the two Democratic frontrunners are a black man and a woman. It’s as if America posted an ad on Craigslist searching for a “tall, dark handsome man to lead the country” and fate threw us a curveball. There’s also the fact that the GOP’s traditional niche as the conservative party of morality is rapidly coming unglued after a string of ugly scandals (honk if you like Mark Foley!). A wide stance, indeed.
The final wildcard in the race is the growing relevance of the internet in American elections. Why waste a postal stamp when you can show support for your candidate of choice by friending him/her on Myspace? Then there’s the “Youtube Effect”: for example, former Senator George Allen famously lost the 2006 election in part because of a racial slur he used on film during a campaign stop. Now more than ever, politicians need to watch what they say, as any verbal slip can be viewed by millions of Americans within minutes. Most recent example: "Childrens do learn." - Dubya
So what am I looking for in a candidate? Firstly, I hope to be voting for rather than against a candidate, unlike many of those anti-Bush folk three years ago. I’ve already started doing some research so I can be a happy, healthy informed voter. This summer, I read Barack Obama’s well-intentioned, yet awfully dull memoir, Dreams from my Father. And, um… I also watched Hillary’s Youtube spoof of the final Sopranos episode. So yes, I have debates to watch, articles to read and about 13 months to go. I’m sure you’ll enjoy your day off from school on Election Day ’08, maybe even sleep late. Me, I’ll be sporting my bitingly witty ‘Nixon in `78’ shirt and having a hell of a time playing with that lever to close the voting booth curtain.
Labels: guest essay
