Wherever you stand on the presidential election, this is the part that really concerns me.  We're so divided as a country.  Whoever wins will spend the next 4 years fighting off attacks by the losing side.  And neither side is at all inclined to say "OK, my candidate lost; let's get behind the president."

After the vote, what will we do?
BY LEONARD PITTS JR.

October 29, 2004

And finally, the showdown is almost here.

After a campaign that feels like it has run for a million years, voters go to the polls Tuesday. Then the lawyers go to court on Wednesday and presto, just four to six short weeks from now, we'll know who's going to lead this country for the next four years.

Unfortunately, that's only the second most pressing question we face. The first, for my money, is simply this: What happens next? I'm not talking about Iraq, Afghanistan or health care. I'm talking about us. About we, the people.

The nation has seldom been so torn and angry, rent by such a jagged divide. There is a cultural element to it, of course, the defenders and opposers of gay rights and other hot-button issues squaring off over what ought and ought not be considered acceptable. But even given that, it seems to me the division ultimately has little to do with our broad national goals. Those, we agree on.

Stabilize Iraq and get out? Definitely.

Press the war on terror? Without a doubt.

Health care reform? Good idea.

The real issue
What is in contention, then, is not so much the what, but the how and the who.

Therein lies the rub. The two men vying for president have engendered so much raw anger that it's difficult to imagine the supporters of whoever loses simply accepting the defeat with grace and moving on. One is hard pressed to envision the entire country uniting behind him or accepting him as president of us all.

The anger toward George W. Bush is, of course, a residual effect of what many consider the stolen election of 2000. In that view, the Supreme Court installed in the presidency a fortunate son of no great intellectual rigor. The fact that the self-professed uniter immediately took a sharp turn to the political right and revealed an unerring instinct for flip-the-bird unilateralism certainly didn't help.

The anger toward John Kerry is a newer phenomenon; most Americans couldn't have picked him out of a police line-up before this year. But a sophisticated GOP campaign to define the senator has made up for lost time, painting him as an effete and foppish man of no discernible principles or backbone who lied about his service in Vietnam.

I would argue, though, that the origin of the antagonism matters less than its effect, which has been manifest in a brand of electioneering stunning in its vindictiveness and breathtaking in its pettiness. We're talking about the theft of lawn signs, the defacement of bumper stickers, people fired for supporting a candidate the boss does not, allegations of voter intimidation that sound like something out of Alabama, circa 1956.

A sense of entitlement
We're talking, in other words, about behavior better suited to some backwater dictatorship than to the world's flagship democracy. There is a bacchanalian quality to all of this, a sense of rules suspended and license granted and victory by any means necessary.

But as the old song says, there's got to be a morning after. Whether it is President Kerry or President Bush who begins his term in January, the challenge we face will be the same. To find a way back to common cause, a way that we can all be Americans again.

There is no guarantee we can do it or that we will even try. It will certainly not be easy. The rifts are real, the cuts deep. And if we fail, what happens? What does the future look like then?

Or does anybody even care?

The bacchanal is in full swing. Heaven help us when the morning comes.

LEONARD PITTS JR. appears most Wednesdays and Fridays in the Free Press. Reach him at the Miami Herald, 1 Herald Plaza, Miami, FL 33132; toll free at 888-251-4407 or at [email protected].

Copyright © 2004 Detroit Free Press Inc.

I think the deep schism in America has been more pressing to me than than any single issue or candidate.  I have participated in this board as much to try to grasp the underpinnings of it as to discuss the specifics of the candidates and issues.

I have drawn no eye-opening conclusions that I would share publically.  

It seems to me the rapidity of change in the 21st century is at the heart of this.  The transition from the industrial age to the information age is the fastest fundamental shift in context in the history of the planet, by several hundred years.  

People respond to the context they are in - and this context is rapidly changing.  Things like how we shape our core humanity into values that respond to a context take time to distill.  In times of stress, people tend to "de-evolve" into more primitive states of mind - and we see the rise of popular radio talk show hosts and religious fundamentalism as symptoms of this.  

I personally believe this is a time when we need a true political and stateman genius to emerge who can begin to break down the existing party structures and who can navigage the incredibly powerful press to assert a compelling vision of where we are heading, the risks and opportunities, with no fat on the bone.  

One aside: I was listening to my son last night broadcast on his college radio station and he and his partner were interviewing the college president, whose comment about the media was really astute. He said the media's objective is to insinuate itself as the expert, so that for example, after the debates, it positions itself as the evaluator and proclaimer of the "victor."  Of course, now we can get our information from someone whose perspective we already know validates our own bent.  So we go to this source, and sure enough, our guy won. Ideology trumps analysis, and the media takes as its primary goal to persuade us that we must turn to them to do the thinking for us.

It will take a true genius to navigate these waters....

I blame some of the divisiveness on the Rush Limbaugh/Sean Hannity "Republicans are good and always right; Democrats are bad and always wrong" daily sermon to America.  A lot of people don't want to think for themselves and think whatever St. Rush tells them to think.  I'm an independent who leans left, and I have voted for candidates of both parties at all levels of government.  I just wish we could get a centrist leader who really had the best interest of America's citizens in mind, not another politician who panders to his base.

I saw Rudy Giuliani (sp?) on the Charlie Rose show a couple months ago, and he was talking about how true Republicans were all about staying out of peoples' lives.  A true Republican would never get involved in a gay marriage banning amendment.  Who cares if gay people get married?  Don't we have bigger fish to fry?

Clinton gets impeached and damn near thrown out of office for lying about a blow job.  Bush lies about WMDs and more than one thousand Americans die.  Where's the outrage?

It doesn't matter who "wins".

This is going straight to court and whichever side ultimately loses will plot and scheme.

Both men will have numerous BS attempts made to impeach them while in office.

But, considering the result if the president IS impeached...do you want Cheney or Edwards as president?

Remember that book from the 70s where California and Oregon break from the union- I think it was called EcoTopia?  Might be a good solution.  Perhaps the Rockies instead of the Sierras might be a god divide.

Secession is not a bad word, just a political choice.  I have always felt more in tune with Canada then Texas or Florida!  Re-designing the nature of the state might be helpful.

Since we are NOT held together by nationality but by political ideas, we can do what we want.

That said, I'd like to stay together if we can.  But if not, no big.  

And certainly no reason for civil war.  The last one was probalby illegal and certainly not necessary- although the outcome was ok.

I really do believe that we are at a crossroads on several overlapping levels.  That is one of the reasons things are so polarized.  

I had a great argument with a co-worker last nite, stuck at a airport bar.  Here are the big crossroads we identified.

Globalism: Outsourcing, trade barriers, etc are really coming to a head and the globalist aims DO threaten US farms and manufaturing.  At the same time, it also is one of the many factors feeding terrorism - fundamentalists hate the westernization (and judeo-christinization) or their culture, as do the French.

US World Role: There are two compelling arguments about the "global test."  One says that the US has never been so powerful, in a post cold war world with very loose alliances, maybe it is time for us to start acting unilaterally.  The importance of W. Europe is mostly history and doesnt reflect today's numbers.  The only country comparable to the US is China, and shit, they don't listen to ANYBODY.  This is a seductive argument subject to false arrogance but in times of change, you have to consider the unconventional.

on the other hand, you could also say that economic globalism, clearly a Bush priority, requires military globalism.  Its a strong argument as well and one that goes with conventional wisdom.

Guns & Butter, Part III: Its clear that Bush is economically conservative unless it comes to military, where he wields a Steinbrenner-esque pen.  Leaving aside WTF Kerry would really do (I suppose he truly has been anti-war but has been too much of a puss to say so), we're in another guns vs. butter situation.  My question is: If you believe in the war, or even a war in Afghanistan, are you willing to pay for it? I question whether this generation, long removed from WWII, will ever truly sacrifice their own personal consumption to fight any war that doesn't have a Pearl Harbor-esque justification.

I think our mutual problem is that, given the controversial nature of these issues, we might never have a candidate willing to be truthful about these issues: instead, we'll have these master manipulators running on anecdote, slogan, self serving interpretation.

Wow, now that was a rant!

"And certainly no reason for civil war.  The last one was probalby illegal and certainly not necessary- although the outcome was ok."

I don't understand that last comment... illigal, probbably not since it was about state's rights (federal power vs. power reserved for the states - but that's another discussion).

But the outcome was ok.... WTF, a half a million deaths is OK???

Is that an ends justify the means statement, or is it that you meant to say that it's ok that some half a million laid dead at the end of it since they were only dumb Americans & that they shouldn't have resisted the Federal Government's efforts to force it's will over the states?