What saddens me is that while in the 2012 elections it seems most Obama voters were effectively choosing the lesser of two evils, in 2008 they were voting for Obama. They believed in what he was supposed to represent.
In retrospect, maybe they were voting against Bush. In the next election maybe a majority will vote against Obama, and the game will keep going.
What saddens me is that while in the 2012 elections it seems most Obama voters were effectively choosing the lesser of two evils, in 2008 they were voting for Obama. They believed in what he was supposed to represent.
They wanted to believe. Even then Obama gave off considerable whiffs of being a relative political neophyte who felt entitled -- or even destined -- to power, and was given an easy path into the White House by an all-too-eager Democratic apparatus. Still, I was glad he won in 2008 because of his platform; he eventually reneged on so many of his campaign promises that I could not, in good conscience, vote for him in 2012.
I think most people, even those who follow politics, buy into the emotional experience rather than the actual politics. It makes people feel good to listen to a great speech on paying back birth control pills, who cares that it's a really small issue compared to foreign policy or economic policy. The number of real 'political engineers' is really small anyway.
I don't even blame those people. For example I am a car enthusiast but not a car engineer, so while I may love the Porsche brand for the emotional connections it has in my mind, a car engineer who really knows what he's talking about may very well know for a fact that the tech for part X is better in a Toyota. I don't know and I don't care.
People just get disappointed in politicians because they operate in an incentive system that rewards them for not keeping their promises, because votes are a 'sunk revenue' once in office. If laws were made in a private market, they'd be incentivized to be more consistent.
We may never have a true democratic election in the US again. As long as the NSA dragnet exists, we'll never know what privately collected information was used to humiliate political opponents or cause them to withdraw from the race rather than face public embarrassment.
What you're specifically alleging could be equally applied to elections in which Nixon was involved, which wer influenced by McCarthyism, when J Edgar Hoover was in office...we could go on tracing it back to the suppression of Shays' Rebellion in 1787 (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shay%27s_Rebellion#Impact_on_Co...).
To agree with anigbrowl, corruption at the ballot box has pretty much been a thing in politics since America's inception. But there are a lot of assumptions in your lament that are extremely problematic.
Political opponents are not the crux of democracy. Very few things in the apparatus of government are dismantled upon the election of any office. Office holders set the direction and make the crucial decisions, but they are not the messiahs we make them out to be. It's comforting to believe in benevolent dictators and lofty monarchs, but if your only real choice is between two people, you're already failing as a democracy.
The choice for an elected official should stand on that candidate's character and their willingness to listen and engage on the issues you care about. But the issues themselves are something you yourself remain responsible for.
We haven't had a "true democratic election" since we came up with party platforms.
In retrospect, maybe they were voting against Bush. In the next election maybe a majority will vote against Obama, and the game will keep going.