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[This related article is recommended in its entirety.]
“[W]hen looking to check a presidential agenda that they detest, the voters are willing to accommodate some occasional rhetorical excesses. They are not, of course, electing a chief executive; they are electing people to stop the chief executive from doing things they don’t like. It is hard for Democrats to scare voters by painting their opponents as extremists. So they must resort to ever more hysterical claims and attacks to convince the public that the GOP challengers are so far beyond the pale that they aren’t fit to hold office.”
— JENNIFER RUBIN, 10.18.2010 (commentarymagazine.com)
The highly-emotional National Election of 2008 swept into office a man who was eminently unqualified to lead the Nation in a time of war and a concomitant economic recession — the result of irrational exuberance of the worst kind. A majority of the electorate, aided and abetted by a mainstream media that largely abrogated its credo of non-partisanship vis-a-vis a highly-divisive leftist ideologue masquerading as anything but, was persuaded to compound an already dangerous situation into a chaotic one. Moreover, two years into the fray, the abettors continue herding the dwindling unchastened-flock toward the abyss.
This election cycle, however, appears headed in a different direction — the sort of change that rational people can believe in. What is different now, as opposed to the heady days of 2008, is not the absence of emotion, but, instead, a healthy dose of reason to resonate with it. Of course, the reason for the emotion itself has changed too. No longer does it favor the inept leadership that has engendered the chaotic state of affairs, but, rather, the rationality of the opposition.
As Churchill assessed for the ages, though ensuing generations seem to require regular reminding, "Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all the others that have been tried from time to time". A Constitutionally-limited republic such as ours is far from perfect, as the past couple of years has amply demonstrated. But our strength and quality as a nation with a "government of the people, by the people, and for the people" rests within our rights and privileges to correct our mistakes, deriving, as they may, from irrational exuberance, mistaken identity, insufficient consideration of the candidate's worthiness to serve, and many other occasional aberrations.
In 2010 it is high-time to embrace the so-maligned "party of no". For "no" is the correct response to what ails us.
Post 1,453 Ephemeral Emotion and Resonant Reason
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