Wedged

As you might guess, I'll be passing on the sticker.

One of the things that I came to understand as an adult is that while politics had an effect on many aspects of my life, the actual identity of the person in the Oval Office rarely, if ever, made a direct, noticeable, difference. And so I learned to be more interested in who my Representatives and Senators were, and who was being elected into office at the state and local level.

But we live in a political environment where the Apocalypse is seemingly one wrong vote away. And as the two major parties become more and more polarized, they have made an open lack of respect for each other into a virtue as they see to energize and mobilize their base voters.

As you may have guessed, I'm no more thankful for the Obama presidency than I was for anyone else's, and I take exception to terming the 10 participants in yesterday's Republican primary debate "fools." Even though I couldn't see myself voting for more than one or two of them, if it came to that, I don't see them as being any more foolish than any other person who conducts a serious run for the White House, regardless of how little I agree with their policies.

In the end, the calculus is simple: Republican voters are Americans too, and I don't see how the nation fixes some of the issues that ail it if all the two parties have for one another is animosity and spite. Contrary to popular mythology, the United States has never been a unified populace. If we ever want it to be one, dialing back on things like this would be helpful. But that would take something of a truce - not between the Democrats and Republican parties/political establishments, but between their broader voting bases. Which seems unlikely. So I suspect that we'll simply see this sort of thing go on, at least for the immediate future.