No Hangover Zone
After listening to many political hopefuls chirping about running government like a business and professing their own stellar CEOmanship skills, let’s borrow from commerce for a little post-election reality:
You get what you vote for.
No good waking up Wednesday morning with buyer’s remorse. Too late to say “What have we done?” Not good enough to wonder if just filling in the blanks made any difference. We get what we voted for.
Yes, we can analyze what happened (paralysis by analysis?). It might provide insight into the mood of the electorate, such as it is. “Electorate: noun; about a third of the people, on any given election day.”
The upshot of such enterprise is often confounding. On Election Day, a CBS News/NY Times poll indicated people found the Dems more favorable than their GOP rivals by nearly 20 percentage points. But when asked to rate specific Democrats — Hillary Clinton, Al Gore, John Kerry — the bottom fell out of the donkey.
Political hacks — this is the season for them and their individual renditions of high dudgeon — may fawn over such trends and numbers and percentages. The rest of us, however, have to live with the results.
What is the relationship between what has been promised or bragged about and the real world, where we live. Should we wonder, too, if winning has become more important than governing. But then that is a question that needs to be asked before an election, isn’t it?