The mainstream media, which had given Bush (“I’m a war president”) a pass for three long years seems – finally – to be crawling out of its communal spider hole.
Thanks to Vietnam vet John Kerry, who has been through one or two political fights in his long career, the media now can focus on a candidate from the loyal opposition who is not afraid of the Rove/Bush smear machine.
Perhaps smelling blood, or maybe just hedging their bets in case of a Democratic victory this fall, the press has been giving its attention to the deficit; intelligence failures; and corruption in the military/industrial complex.
In fact, there’s been so much news to read and absorb these days, it’s almost become a part-time job to be an informed citizen.
It’s challenging to keep up, and with two-income families and overbooked personal schedules being the norm, this adds yet another burden to the soccer Moms and Nascar dads, not to mention all the single or childless twenty-, thirty- and forty-somethings who are engaged in climbing up the corporate ladder.
There’s been a huge amount of hand-wringing from post-feminists about how the demands of immediate and extended family have put a damper on the ability of career women to advance to management or even high-level individual contributor positions.
Especially in tech, it’s pretty rare to find women who have reached the top of their game. Being among the best requires tremendous discipline, focus and a huge number of hours, just to keep up with trends and new developments.
People often talk about quality of life conflicts in terms of work versus family, but I have not yet seen anyone talk about factoring in the demands of citizenship and community.
Before the political season began in earnest with the caucuses and primaries, I was able to invite my grandkids for overnight visits, alternating weekends between the 8- and 6-year olds on a pretty regular basis.
Now, just keeping up with my work and the flood of national news has pretty much absorbed all my energy. As a result, I can see how young people, especially those who are parents, couldn’t possibly spare the cycles to keep informed about all those merry pranksters in Washington, DC and elsewhere, like Beacon Hill, Boston, Massachusetts.
That puts a burden, on the Democratic party as (unfortunately) the only viable alternative, to help people very quickly grasp these issues, without having the campaign degenerate into the usual war of glib sound bites.
Of course, we’ve had political fights before in which ideologies were much more dramatically opposed, Nixon/McGovern being the premiere example.
What worries me about this election, though, is that for the first time in my adult memory, the quality of life for average Americans is under heavy assault from the political establishment.
For example, Alan Greenspan, no doubt bucking for re-appointment, has used the office of Chairman of the Federal Reserve Board to launch a salvo against the Social Security system because of his concern about this year’s $477 billion deficit, projected by the CBO to reach a cumulative $1.9 trillion over the next 10 years.
People have, of course, been talking about the shortfall in Social Security benefits funding for at least 30 years. Libertarians candidates like Harry Browne made this part of the platform for his last two runs as a Presidential candidate. By the way, his solution – to sell government assets and reduce spending generally, especially in “defense” – has never been seriously considered by either major party. Of course.
In any event, this is one example of a complex issue which I think the public has not understood very well. I’ve been fortunate enough to be educated about this as an actuarial student and an employee benefits consultant, but I’ve met CFOs who didn’t understand it.
How, then, does the average voter grasp the enormity of a fiscal problem that could result in doubling FICA tax withholdings, slashing benefits in half, or a combination of the two? This is not to mention the social implications of reverting to the pre-FDR days of an impoverished older generation, many of whom will either have to take hemlock or leave the country because they lack the financial resources to live independently.
Which gets back to my original point: it takes time and energy to understand the complicated matters which should inform our decisions about who is running our government.
This is not the mention the time it takes to correspond, thoughtfully and logically, with our elected representatives, many of whom these days are distracted by highly emotional and for most of us, tangential, issues, like whether a certain class of Americans should be able to get married.
Perhaps as a result of sheer exhaustion, the attention of the average adult becomes distracted by private issues that have become civic controversies.
The various proposed marriage amendments are an excellent example. In an era in which defense contractors are getting away with not paying billions in taxes and agribusinesses continue to receive huge subsidies, how does extending the public and private financial benefits of being married to gays and lesbians really hurt taxpayers? As far as I can tell, this hasn’t been part of the debate at all.
Similarly, no one has really explained how the children of Trista and Ryan-like couples are going to be morally corrupted by “Kimmie” who “has two Moms”. (In fact, I’d lay odds that Trista and Ryan, who seem like pleasant, smart, self-confident people wouldn’t be troubled at all by Kimmie or her two Moms.)
But I digress: voters are distracted, as I guess they always have been, but it seems the stakes are getting higher and higher, as quality of life here in the US has been eroded for many of us by globalization and other macroeconomic factors.
So, I’d like to see civic responsibility become part of the dialog when subjects like Super Mom or Super Dad are debated in public forums.
Regardless of whether the media cooperates by turning its focus to major issues, responsible citizenship is a happy burden for those of us lucky enough to live in a democracy.
It does require a commitment of time and attention, and an acknowledgement of the same, and this deserves both prominent mentioning in discussions of work/life balance and in the examples set by those who are business, academic and technical leaders: in other words, those who are not professional politicians.