Last weekend I went to Allentown, Pennsylvania, to register new voters and talk about the Obama/Biden ticket with people who'd been identified as undecided in this election. The four other campaign volunteers in my carpool from New Jersey all seemed emblematic of the difficult times so many people are experiencing: One was an office manager who'd been out of work for a year. Another was a 30-year-old paralegal whose large New York firm had cut out so many staff jobs that she found herself doing twice as much, while taking on a part-time job at Trader Joe's in order to save money for more education. The driver of the car, a jazz musician in his 50s, was feeling so financially strapped that he asked everyone to pitch in for gas money --- something I haven't experienced since college ski trips.
The only thing I knew about the city we were visiting was the Billy Joel song: "We're living here in Allentown, and they're closing all the factories down." The main street where we picked up canvassing materials should have been buzzing with activity on a pretty autumn Saturday morning, but it seemed nearly deserted--cafes closed, beauty parlor empty, shops without shoppers. As we moved into a neighborhood on the outskirts of town, we found ourselves knocking on the doors of houses that badly needed painting, with broken doorbells and black plastic garbage bags covering broken windows. These people were clearly hurting.
And yet.... Each person we visited seemed to focus on one specific issue other than the economy that would determine his or her vote, often not seeing the forest for the trees. One man asserted that nobody was going to take his right to carry a gun. (When I asked if he had any thoughts about how to keep guns out of the wrong hands, he said, "Yeah, give one to everybody, like in the Wild West.") Another man, although registered, declared he would not be voting this year because "it didn't matter." And there was the predictable man declaring himself a Christian who could not vote for a "baby-killer." I respect anyone's personal concerns about when life begins, but I can't respect the attempt to turn a private religious belief into public policy. (And I always want to quote the distinguished English doctor and playwright Jonathan Miller: "Anyone who believes the living sperm has a right to life might wish to say a requiem mass every time he takes a hot bath.") But this was not a time for levity. I tried to explain that Barack Obama and Joe Biden both consider themselves Christians, every bit as righteous as this man did. But they acknowledge that women will always seek a way to exert dominion over their own bodies. Tearing down Roe v.Wade (a virtual certainty of a McCain-influenced Supreme Court) will simply send women back to butchers. And the number of abortions actually goes down dramatically during Democratic administrations, which tend to support sex education and other programs to reduce unwanted pregnancies. It was like talking to the Great Wall.
We asked the people we visited the same questions that Ronald Reagan asked in the 1980 election: Are you better off now than you were four years ago? Does your dollar buy more than it did four years ago? Is America more respected in the world than it was four years ago? We reminded people of John McCain, just a few weeks earlier, saying that the fundamentals of our economy are strong (and more recently trying to double-talk and explain that he "meant" our work force is capable and resilient).
We all know that McCain suffered horribly at the hands of the Viet Cong, that he still carries scars of his time as a prisoner of war. But it's hard to understand how that honorable service of half a century ago is a useful qualification for the Oval Office in the 21st century, and it's equally hard to understand how he can assume the mantle of change after more than 30 years in Washington. But the most alarming aspect of McCain's candidacy is Sarah Palin, a woman aspiring to be a heartbeat away from a septuagenarian who has never issued a full public release of his medical records (he offered a sheaf of papers for three hours to reporters who were not allowed to take them from the room), but has had four known bouts of melanoma, one of the deadliest cancers. Palin sat in her church listening to the founder of Jews for Jesus deliver a sermon that attributed Israeli deaths to God's payment against people who won't accept Christ as their savior. (It's also a church where the congregants are waiting for the rapture while telling homosexuals to "pray the gay away.") She lies outright about small matters (firing the governor's private chef) and big matters (supporting the "bridge to nowhere," then opposing it for political expediency while keeping $300 million in pork). She has left the United States just once in her life (and lists as a country she's visited the place where her plane refueled). Her biggest credential for foreign policy experience is that Alaska is near Russia.
The idea of anyone in financial straits being a Republican sounds like an oxymoron to me. How do you align yourself with a party that doesn't represent you, your values, your interests, your pocketbook? And I truly don't understand how, at this stage of the election cycle, anyone could still be "undecided." In the past eight years, George Bush has almost doubled the national debt, spending $10 billion a month on, as legendary conservative Christopher Buckley put it, an ill-premised and ill-waged war that has not made us any safer, and now spending close to a trillion dollars for the misbegotten bank system. To decide how to vote this November, all you need do is look at the photos of George Bush and John McCain with their arms wrapped around each other, and remember McCain's rare but honest admission that the economy is not his strong suit.