I Hope the Election Goes My Way for Once — So I May Enjoy a Peaceful Sleep Tonight

Although I vote religiously, and in fact have already voted, I’m obsessed with this election. For reasons I can’t quite figure out, this election cycle started some 20-odd months ago. Since I don’t watch much television, I only tuned in about five or six months ago when the race whittled down to Sen. Hillary Clinton and Obama. I could write thousands of words about my dislike of Clinton, but suffice it to say I was petrified that her ascension to the Democratic nomination was a foregone conclusion.

Far too many days of my summer vacation abroad centered around a tiny, often fuzzy, television waiting for the Clinton concession speech.

While I was in my bathroom this morning checking for hives, my husband wanted to know why it mattered so much to me who won this election. He sleeps like a baby, sure that Obama’s going to win because Nate Silver of fivethirtyeight.com says so. He trusts the math. For someone whose great-great-grandparents started out as three-fifths of a person in the Electoral College—with no vote to influence it—I’m not so sanguine.

I will acknowledge that this election’s outcome will make little difference in my personal, day-to-day life. In fact, if Sen. John McCain is elected, I will continue to enjoy the Bush tax cuts, and I can continue to hoard cash with boundless glee. I will still write novels, because Americans will surely need the escapism. My dogs will bark. My cats will meow. I’ll still live in a “blue” county, in a “blue” state. Southern California will still enjoy the four seasons: fire, flood, mudslide, and earthquake. KCAL-9 will still have car chases.

The Dreaded Alternative

My worry is far more selfless. If McCain becomes the next President, I think our country’s place in history as a third-world bully will be solidified. Whether stolen elections, religious fanaticism, or fossil fuel wars will be our downfall, I can’t say – but I don’t think McCain has the gravitas or vision to put us on the path to something better. To him, “maverick” seems to mean little more than “no guiding principles.”

Worse, my McCain fear is that he will excise his personal demons on America’s foreign policy. Just as President Bush avenged his father by deposing and murdering Saddam Hussein in an ill-conceived war, I think McCain, who came back broken and defeated from another ill-conceived war, will try to “win” in Iraq, no matter the cost. That cost will be our already struggling economy. That cost will include our standing in the world, and thus the ability to win friends and influence people. (And that may well be a good thing if Obama loses and McCain wins.) That cost will be more Iraqi lives and more American lives.

And let’s not even discuss the possible premature death of the cancer-surviving, septuagenarian President McCain, leaving us with Vice President Sarah (Caribou Barbie) Palin. I don’t want to see that moose in the headlights when the tough decisions need to be made.

The other worry is that this election will be a referendum on race. In many ways the United States has come very far since our painful slaveholding, Jim Crow, lynching, Bull Connor, civil rights past. In other ways it has not.

Injustices Still to be Corrected

Inner city decay, horrendous public school conditions, a deeply flawed criminal justice system, and enormous divides in hereditary wealth between the descendents of slaves and their owners, reflect and perpetuate the sins of the past. Perhaps I’m not optimistic enough, but I can’t imagine the same folks who won’t hire people, or live in the same neighborhood, or send their kids to public school with more than a handful of people who look like me, will—in the privacy of the voting booth—actually flip that lever or punch that chad for an African American man for President.

I also worry that he will be assassinated by one of the right-wing crazies that love to attend McCain-Palin rallies, shouting niceties like “Kill him,” leaving us with a Joe Biden presidency. America is not voting for Joe Biden.

I even worry that if Americans do overcome their prejudices and place Obama’s name in the ballot box, it will be the last gasp of affirmative action (which former President Bill Clinton put in a coma with a knockout punch). If people hire a black man for the highest office in the land, perhaps they’ll feel they are excused from hiring blacks for all other jobs. Will people suddenly believe that there is no racism or need for a helping hand for blacks who’ve graduated from the aforementioned inner-cities and public schools?

Re-Setting Our Priorities

Do I think this is the most important election in our lifetime? No. Unfortunately, that election passed. You may remember 2000. Former Vice President Al Gore failed in his first, and likely last, test of true leadership, when he authorized his lawyers to cherry-pick four Florida counties for a recount to pick up a few hundred votes while they took no action to address the tens of thousands of voters deliberately turned away from the polls, and then bent the knee to an illegitimate ruling of the U.S. Supreme Court, urging respect for “the rule of law” rather than the will of the people.

I strongly believe every election is important. So important that my first exercise concerned a vote on library funding in Worcester, MA.

This election is important because it will seal the fate of our country. Either way it turns out, the popular vote will split about 50-50. I just want the outcome to go my way for once—so I can get a full night’s sleep.

Jessica Gadsden has been controversial since the day she discovered her inner soapbox. She excoriated the cheerleaders on the editorial page of her high school paper, transferred from a co-educational university to a women's college to protest the gender biased curfew policy, published a newspaper in law school that raked the dean over the coals with (among other things) the headline, "Law School Supports Drug Use"—and that was before she got serious about speaking out. Progressive doesn't begin to define her political views. She's a reformed lawyer, and full time novelist who writes under a pseudonym, of course.This will mark the debut of our newest, and perhaps most charismatic, weekly essayist. A Brooklyn native, she divided her college years between Hampton University and Smith.