My mother has been a candidate in several hotly contested elections, though she has yet to schmooze or kiss a baby to get there (Christmas parties aside). Whether the race been congressional or presidential, her name has appeared, carefully written in elegant script above the boldly printed names of her better-known opponents. When she delivers her ballot into the meticulously manicured hands of the old women working at the polls on Election Day, they peek at her vote, then shoot her withering glances over the tops of their rhinestone reading glasses. As far as I know, my mother has yet to back a winning candidate, but, as she always says, she votes her conscience and sometimes it tells her she’s the best woman for the job.
My mother is the quintessential independent voter, an animal who stirs fear into the hearts of politicians everywhere, especially in my home battleground state of Ohio. With no strong affection for either party, these voters pick and choose their candidates, and during election years are courted with an enthusiasm usually reserved for pursuing underwear models. Generally perceived as vacillating, inept political creatures who wouldn’t know missile defense from medicinal marijuana, independents have garnered ill feelings from all sides amidst the cripplingly partisan political atmosphere of our nation. While it would be easy to write these people off as uninformed troublemakers, they are, as far as I can see, part of the few remaining voices of reason in the bleak desert of American politics, untainted by the grime of party propaganda and blind faith in less-than inspiring leaders. That is not to say that independent thought cannot exist within mainstream party politics; the fact is that too little of this kind of thinking actually takes place.
No one listens to Socrates anymore. He may be long gone, but you don’t get that famous for nothing (unless, of course, you appeared on Laguna Beach) and his legendary one-liner “the unexamined life is not worth living” still rings true. Too many otherwise intelligent Americans leave their thinking to someone else when it comes to voting. We take the easy way out and wind up filling out our ballots in a decidedly lopsided manner, supporting only the candidates of a particular party because we happen to agree with one out of the hundreds of issues that comprise their platform. This behavior occurs most often on the local level, where voters know very little about the candidates that will affect their everyday lives more than those running for national office do. In my hometown it is not uncommon for one to go down the ballot and vote for every judicial candidate with an Irish last name, going on the assumption that the contender must be a Democrat and therefore will do a good job.
My junior and senior years of high school were filled with news from the campaign trail of the presidential election. Ohio, usually relegated to fly-over status by East Coast big shots and Texas tycoons suddenly looked as appealing to pols as the dining room of Café Milano on a Saturday night. Talk over which way the state would go was all-consuming; between the incessant T.V. ads and candidate debates, there was no way to escape the election. It permeated all facets of life, and the debate became especially heated when discussed in my theology class.
Normally one hour a week I enjoyed attending to get Snickers bars in return for answering trivia on the New Testament, the election turned the class into a incessant referendum on the issue of abortion in American politics. As the weeks passed, I grew increasingly shocked at the number of my peers who had made up their minds that Bush was the man for the job simply because his pro-life stance meshed with the Catholic theology we were being taught. No one seemed to give much consideration to the fact that his views on the death penalty and lack of enthusiasm for social justice were vastly contrary to the teachings of the Church, not to mention the fact that our region continued to hemorrhage jobs due in no small part to the president’s economic policies.
Alone in the political wilderness stand the independents, a misunderstood tribe of purple people colored by their mix of blue and red sentiments. They stand in ideological opposition to the one-issue voter and their intrepid individualism should be admired, not admonished by our society. It is a quintessentially American quality to strive for freedom and independence in every form, and a patriotic act to carefully reflect upon the preservation of our democracy through the election of strong leaders, wherever your political inclinations lie. I know that in early November as the snows fly outside the doors of the polling station back home, my mother will once again emerge from behind the worn curtain of the booth, and whether Democrat, Republican or other appears on her ballot, she will head out into the chill with the wisdom of the ancients solidly behind her vote.
