Election BluesBy Joey Horstman '87

It’s September 1979. I’m in the 10th grade, running for a seat on the Fairmont High School Student Council. My opponent—let’s call her Margaret Thatcher—is an experienced, able politician, captain of both the debate team and the cheerleading squad.

Any way you look at it, my campaign is in trouble. She is bright and articulate; I have said three audible words in the past two years. She is sophisticated and confident; I am perpetually embarrassed and prone to forgetting my locker combination. As our freshman class president, she pushed through a piece of legislation that improved study hall conditions; I was in a study hall.

My campaign manager is the starting left tackle on our football team—a sophomore whose GPA suggests multiple blows to the head. We adopt an aggressive media blitz: three posters that read—invitingly, if unconvincingly—“VOTE JOEY!”

The exclamation point was my idea.

I lost. Big. Think Mondale. Think election results announced over the loudspeaker in homeroom.

Thus began the political ill-fortune that has followed me into adulthood. In everything from presidential to school board elections, I tend to support campaigns that end in either defeat or embarrassment—sometimes both.

I was devoted to Jimmy Carter, who was first attacked by a ferocious swimming bunny while on vacation and then collapsed in the middle of a 10K fun run, his face as frightened and pale as mine when Ronald Reagan took the oath of office. In college, I supported Gary Hart (before he took up yachting), and in the 1988 Democratic primary, I proudly stood in Tom Harkin’s corner—by myself, apparently.

Often in politics, the polls are fickle, the information ambiguous and inconclusive. But on this you may depend: If you have my vote, it’s unlikely you have anyone else’s.

So I suffer from low political self-esteem and high political anxiety, which has resulted in an odd mixture of confusion and righteous indignation. As I write this, my hometown is bracing for the Republican National Convention, making plans to keep the protesters out and the bars open.

Conservative commentators are getting more angry (Bill O’Reilly, Rush Limbaugh), liberal commentators more funny (Jon Stewart, Stephen Colbert), and all sides are pining away for that lost golden age of politics that consisted of clean campaigns, honorable candidates, objective media, and informed, intelligent voters who didn’t really debate issues so much as share their already common values and—after a group hug—maybe a Bundt cake.

Well, times have changed. Our challenges, enemies, economy, morals, determination and reputation—they aren’t what they used to be, and, depending who you are, the nation is being ruined by terrorists, gays, illegal immigrants, cultural elites, evangelicals, atheists, Muslims, racists, mortgage companies, oil companies, liberal media, conservative talk radio, radical peaceniks or environmentalists.

There are real issues at stake in this election and much to be concerned about, from the serious (Do we really want to be a nation that tortures its enemies?) to the goofy (Do we really believe the rumor that Obama is Muslim?). Most frightening of all, I think, is that we might really get the leaders we deserve—and that the last two presidents both reflect who we really are.

Sure, there is plenty—or, as we Minnesotans say, “Pawlenty”—that divides us. But why see the chad as half-off rather than half-on? Even if we quibble about foreign and domestic policy, at least we all—red states and blue—agree on two things: 1) Our side represents common sense and decency, and 2) No one is listening to our common sense or respecting our decency.

How odd that this system of government, designed to empower all people, has ended up making us all feel powerless, even when our side wins.

I have run for one elective office since my unsuccessful bid for high school student council. A few years ago I was up for elder of my church. I ran unopposed and won by a narrow margin.

Joey Horstman is an English professor at Bethel University in Minnesota. He earned a doctorate from Purdue University and is the author of Praise, Anxiety and Other Symptoms of Grace (Chalice 2000).