Election Day Thoughts

Yesterday I tried to write an Election Day post, but the upload feature wasn't working. Probably all those bloggers out there hogging the bandwidth! This photo is of a St. Louis landmark, the Old Courthouse. It was a working federal courthouse throughout the 19th Century and into the 20th. The slave Dred Scott lost an appeal for his freedom before the United States Circuit Court meeting in this building in 1854. A 25-year-old Hungarian immigrant named Joseph Pulitzer bought a newspaper in a bankruptcy sale on the steps of this courthouse in 1878, and merged it with another one he owned to found the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. Now we all know that the Dred Scott decision was ultimately superseded by President Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation, and the ratification in 1865 of the 13th Amendment to the Constitution. And earlier this year, the Pulitzer family sold the Post-Dispatch to another publishing group. My point: even the great moments of history don't last forever.

I like the clean, classic lines of The Old Courthouse in downtown St. Louis because it reminds me of the somewhat classical ideals on which our country was founded: life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, a rule of law, an abhorrence of dictatorship or monarchy, equal justice for all. And regularly we hold elections to choose our representatives to carry out these ideals. Since my first election in 1964 (which is the only time I ever voted absentee) I have missed only one opportunity to vote wherever I have lived. Often I find myself on the losing side (I start out in blue states and they turn red, seemingly overnight, after I move there) but I have never subscribed to the cynical theory that my vote doesn't count. You couldn't keep me home on election day with a flotilla of tanks in the street.

Last night I stayed up to watch the election returns. It was a late night; the victor in Missouri's contested Senate race spoke after 1 a.m., followed by a concession speech from the incumbent. The margin of victory was finally about 3 percent, although at the time Claire McCaskill was declared the winner, only about 25,000 votes separated her from Jim Talent. This is one of those extremely rare years that "my" candidate actually won, but I have to confess I have been following the excitement of the political process since I was about 9 years old.

During the hot summer of 1952 in Oklahoma, I remember the political conventions being broadcast, seemingly gavel-to-gavel, on radio (we didn't have television until I was 14.) I would be sent to bed at the usual time but my parents kept the radio on, and I kept sitting bolt upright in my bed, with the door ajar so I could listen to the speeches and above all, the roll call votes. There was something thrilling about hearing "and the Great State of Illinois....casts its ...votes for...Governor Adlai Stevenson!" Or the chants of "I Like Ike" coming from the Republicans as they nominated the general who promised to "go to Korea" and end that conflict. My childhood diary entries reveal that summer I became hooked on politics and that interest probably foreshadowed my interest in journalism. Many of my acquaintances are suspicious of those network news pundits who sit at what nowadays resembles an aircraft carrier control desk and gleefully track the Red and Blue states. Last night their excitement was probably interpreted as a liberal bias. Some of them are liberal, to be sure. But most of the excitement is from an adrenaline rush of reporting on something that is ever-changing, quick moving, novel and historic all at once.

There is nothing else on earth like an American election, even with all the flaws in our political system that surface from time to time. Yesterday morning I spent an hour in a line to use one of the three brand spanking new working computerized voting machines crammed into our tiny precinct headquarters. It was not yet noon and I was voter number 349 in a village of 1500 souls, not all of them of voting age. Turnout in our county was close to 70 percent. People cared about the propositions on the ballot, especially those to protect stem cell research and to raise the minimum wage. They also cared about their local legislators and the Senate contest.. One woman using a walker was attended by her son, a 50-ish fellow in a gray sweatshirt who talked with us in line. I'm pretty sure he didn't vote the way I did, but I liked being there in line with him, anyway. And he had brought his mother to vote. Another man came in a wheelchair. Young people came on their lunch hours from work. Black and white, old and young, Republicans and Democrats and Libertarians and Independents. Americans. As deTocqueville noted: here, the people rule. I can't wait for 2008.