UNGOVERNABLE

No, the title of this post does not refer to the situation in Iraq. It's actually the conclusion about where we are in this country that is slowly taking shape in my mind as we enter the last week of this election cycle. I had hoped that in the last week President Bush would begin to pull away from Senator Kerry as more Americans became familiar with him and his policies and judged them wanting. My second best scenario was that Americans would coalesce around Senator Kerry as the preferable alternative to President Bush, recognizing that Kerry's foreign policy, especially concerning the war, really isn't all that different from the President's. Neither appears to be happening. Bush partisans (and I count myself among them), while many of us find fault with some of his positions and decisions, are solidly with the President. Kerry partisans, while many find fault with either his positions, his style, or both, are solidly with him. Polling seems to indicate very few people in-between. In every society in recorded history, when people are so divided that they see the same facts and draw completely different conclusions, trouble is the result.

Thus, the title of this post....ungovernable. An image is beginning to form of a repeat of 2000, but this time with the specter of a war on-going, with thousands of American troops in harms way, with enemies ready to strike us if they perceive weakness. Furthermore, because of those factors, a repeat of 2000 would be far, far worse. In 2000 we thought the good times would go on forever. We lived in an era of perceived peace and prosperity. Only a small minority of folks were so embittered by the results that they refused to recognize the outcome of the election. In the days following 9/11, George W. Bush enjoyed over 90% job approval. Will the next President, if he wins by the narrowest of margins, if, heaven forbid, he wins the Electoral College but not the popular vote, be able to govern?

This does not seem fanciful to me sitting at my keyboard, watching the news on TV, listening to the radio, reading the polls and the columns and the posts on the internet. Only once in American history did a large segment of the population reject the results of a presidential election. That, of course, was 1860. The election of Abraham Lincoln led to the secession of the southern states and a bloody Civil War. The way we frame our citizenship is very different now. There is no bloc of political leaders who have a ready made answer to the election of an unacceptable President as the leaders of the South did in 1860 when they opted for state secession. But it seems as if passions are certainly running pretty high. It seems the issues we face are nearly as existential as slavery and state's rights. While I don't imagine widespread, large-scale violence in the aftermath of a disputed election, I do expect scorched-earth political tactics in Washington to reach levels we haven't yet seen. Thus, the word ungovernable.

The consequences of such an outcome, assuming you buy into my assumptions, would be survivable if these were ordinary times. Eventually we would have another election. A new, uniting figure would emerge, a Reagan, a Roosevelt, who would tap into the shared vision we have of what America is and should be. But these are not ordinary times. We are at war. Can it be possible that we are witnessing the first evidence, at the seeming height of our power, of America's true decline? I hope I'm wrong. I hope the polls are wrong. I hope Americans swing definitively towards one candidate or the other (preferably the President). If not, the Chinese curse I allude to in the banner of this blog will seem all the more real for our generation.