It seems to me that I have heard more people willing to engage in public conversation about this election than I have ever experienced before. Around my office, before and after meetings, on an employee shuttle bus I take daily, everywhere. Grocery clerks discuss it with their customers at the local Pick and Save.
Same with you? Do you remember any election more heavily discussed, and I’m talking about among relative strangers?
Closest thing to this election as far as that happening was the Clinton impeachment hearings. Nothing with elections, though. But I suspect it’ll be even more ramped up in '08 regardless of whom wins.
(I miss Pick 'N Save!)
Fixed title.
Most talked about ever, definitely.
Most…vehement somehow, too. I’m fine with disagreeing with folks, but this is the first ever election where I’ve watched people I always thought were reasonable absolutely lose it. I’ve lost respect for acquaintances that spout partisan quackery without ever forming their own opinions or learning about more than their side of an issue, etc.
Funny, I explain to my son that differering opinions can’t be wrong, Grandpa votes for X and I vote for Y and those are both valid opinions on those issues, it’s just a matter of how Grandpa prioritizes X higher and Y’s more important to me. My son’s eleven, and he gets it, yet I watch adults scream at one another all the time who don’t get it.
Nope. But then maybe I am old enough to remember more elections than some of you.
This makes every previous election in my memory pale in comparison (I go back to 1964 for recollection). This is also the most important election in the history of mankind.
Not for me. Last election, I worked in a company with one other American, and he and I supported different sides. We had a fair amount of good-natured debate about it, and remained friends afterwards.
This year, I work at a different company, with two other Americans. As it turns out, the three of us all happen to support the same candidate, so there’s not much to debate.
Most of the Japanese staff have asked “who do you support?” out of curiosity and just left it at that.
1968 probably was equally vociferously debated but that election year took many many twists and turns, whereas this one has been a constant (at least since Kerry took an imposing lead in the Democratic primary).
In '68 you had the Johnson admin versus the war protesters leading into the season up until Johnson said he would not be running for reelection; you had the whole cultural revolution thing, with the Establishment versus the Hippies getting stirred into the pro-war / anti-war debates, and the Get Clean for Gene anti-war folks sometimes getting crossways with the countercultural types they thought were helping to polarize the nation against the antiwar position while being thought of as sellout or square-politics types themselves; you had the Kennedy supporters versus the Gene McCarthy supporters, too; there had to have been something going on the Republican primary season that was decently controversial, too (I doubt that Nixon took the nomination without some rancor) but if so I’ve forgotten it; you had the growing tension after the RFK assassination between the lefty-counterculture types involved in Democratic politics that year and the generally older party honchos, and then between the Chicago mayor and the lefty-counterculture (including Abbie Hoffman and all that) and the Chicago riots.
Oh, and let us not forget Mister George Wallace and his divisive 3rd-party candidacy, and how fond the mainstream Democratic Party was of him (if you think the modern Democrats resent Nader you should’ve heard what was said of Wallace! This was still in an era when southerners Just Didn’t Vote Republican so Wallace wasn’t taking away Nixon votes in the south, in case you’re wondering).
And then the election itself, which was another close one.
Funny thing, all my liberal friends swear this is the most debated ever, and swear this is the most hated president ever. And my conservative friends don’t see either of those.
My pet theory is that when your candidate is in office, everything is fine, and when yours isn’t, it’s easy to get worked into a tizzy thinking the world is going to fall apart if you don’t get back on top.
Even moreso then the 1861 US presidental election?
Or the 1933 German election?
My election memories go back to Nixon’s 2nd term in 1922, though I wasn’t quite old enough to vite in that one. Still, that leaves elections where Nixon, Ford, Reagan and Bush Senior were Repunlican incumbents. None of them generated anywhere near the buzz as this one, at least in my (liberal) circles.
Nitpick- Lincoln was elected in 1860, not 1861. Yes, more so than either of those. This election will determine if the United States will be counted among the civilized nations or becomes an imperialistic theocracy. It will determine whether freedom is reborn or forever extinguished. Wednesday morning, we will awaken either with a glimmer of hope or with the gloom of doom.
Oh, please. It’s important, yes, but regardless of the outcome, neither of your predictions will come to pass. Read some history. Read a lot of it, including original sources. Get a little perspective. For starters, every candidate (or his supporters) always claims that only this one person can save the nation, nay, the planet, if not the universe from certain doom. And after every election there’s one winner and one or more losers and somehow things go on. Regardless of which candidate you like and which you loathe, we’ve come through worse.
MLS:
A glimmer of hope is out of the question? :eek:
Well, yeah, a glimmer of hope. Either way. I was referring to the previous 2 sentences, and got carried away by the hyperbole. Sorry about that.
MLS
BobLibDem’s previous sentences:
The United States being counted among the civilized nations is out of the question? :eek:
Seriously speaking, there are a lot of real bones underneath BobLibDem’s assertions. Not so much what GWB can or might do (bad though that could be) but what he’s already done and therefore the imperative need for the United States to repudiate that. There really and truly are Americans — not in short supply — who openly wish that the US be a theocracy and, only slightly less overtly, endorse its new career as Empire. And they are George’s constituency, and he their candidate. As a social force and a political trend, I want to see it shut down, slapped down. So does the overwhelming majority of the rest of the world, and I invite you to ask them how hyperbolic and overstated BobLibDem’s florid descriptions really are.
Very well put. The reasonable Republicans have a tendency to mask what the rest are like.
Wishing I had the link and/or could remember the exact source, but a recent editorial in a conservative journal said of Bush, “It’s as if all that 1960s-era ridiculous left-wing hyperbole about Republicans being imperialist warmongers were embraced turned into official administrative policy”.
Well, I was just answering one question at a time!
I’m sure you can find Americans who want a theocracy and empire. There are also Americans who would love a completely socialist state. That doesn’t mean either one is going to come close to happening.
I’ve seen the political and social pendulum swing back and forth quite regularly; in each turn there are people (both here and abroad) who decry the horrors that are about to occur. Just a few decades ago, some were sure the whole country was going straight to hell because of all those hippies and beatniks and whatnot and their weird music and crazy ideas. There are people today who are sure that it already has.
We have a marvelous system of checks and balances; sure, sometimes things get lopsided one way and then the other. Regardless of who gets elected the day after tomorrow, the country will survive. It’s not as if we’re electing a dictator, for Pete’s sake. Even if both the house and the senate were to end up controlled by the same political ideology as the presidency (an unlikely event), factions within that party would soon start sqabbling amongst themselves.
“Debated”? Hell no. If this election was being held in Ireland you would see a new meaning for the word “landslide”.
And from an international perspective BobLibDem does have a point. There is a sense that America has screwed up monumentally in its response to 9/11 and that this election is their one chance to put it right. If Bush is returned to office, it will be seen as endorsement of all the things his administration has done which have really put off most of the rest of the world, and those non-Americans who have been willing to give the American people the benefit of the doubt will be a lot less prepared to do so.