Good Guys

Voting Machine

I would like to offer a reflection on the upcoming presidential election.

When I was a little kid, my parents would go out to vote in the presidential election, and when they got back I always had two questions to ask them: (1) You voted for the good guy, right? and (2) Did the good guy win or lose? Yes I was only six or seven years old at the time and my knowledge of politics was...weak at best. But interestingly enough, I think those two questions have, in a way, come to define not only the way that adults vote for candidates, but also how the candidates appeal to the voters.

We'll start with how candidates appeal to voters, as this is generally the launching point of this particular political process. The candidates go about this appeal in two ways: tell the community how great they and their accomplishments are, and/or destroy their opponent with semi-factual invective. They promise to do great things and to do them better (or drastically differently) from the opposition, utilizing the powers of the office they are running for to do so.

The flip-side is also true. Voters are pitched pervasive ideas of the goodness or evil of one candidate or the other, and begin to finalize their choice. They look at the good that one promises to do with the powers of office, or they recoil from the evil that another is said to be planning with the same office. One candidate becomes the “good guy” and the other the “bad guy.” The voter weighs the different facts and/or emotions involved with one guy or the other, and finally makes his choice for one because that one will use the office to get things done, to do good things, to go against the flow.

In essence, with a presidential election nowadays it boils down to this: utilizing the extraordinary powers accumulated by the office of the president, our candidate can do a much better, far more fantastic job of getting things done and moving things along than your guy. Our guy will be more vigilant in killing terrorists than your guy, more creative in stimulating the economy than your guy, more hard-nosed about regulating businesses than your guy, more concerned for the environment than your guy. Our guy will increase defense spending into the stratosphere to keep us safe, or our guy will increase the funding of the EPA one hundredfold to keep our kids safe. And all because our guy uses absolute power for good, and yours uses absolute power for evil.

Perhaps this is a small exaggeration, but I have heard all of these arguments enough times from enough prominent people to believe that frighteningly little of what I just laid out is hyperbole. Did you vote for the good guy, and did he win? Because if he wins, he's gonna do good stuff with his power.

The question manages to almost entirely miss the point. What we might want to look at a little more closely first is not the things our candidates promise to do once in elected office, but the powers of that office that allow them to promise such insane things in the first place.

Since when was the president of the United States authorized to hunt down, indefinitely detain or kill individual people, be they terrorist or otherwise, Americans or otherwise? President Obama just signed that one into law at the beginning of this year, with Republican help. I am sure a Republican president would have found such a law to be just as tempting to sign.

Since when was the president of the United States ever supposed to have the power to stir the economic pot any which way he chose? Within this past decade both President Bush and President Obama have tried doing just that, with stimulus packages, bailouts, takeovers, and government loans. And Mitt Romney is touting his experience as a businessman as a factor of electability, experience he promises to use as president. All of these men either have meddled or propose to meddle to greater or lesser degrees.

And since when has the president had the gall to insist that the people involved in religious institutions violate their consciences?

The list of inflated and ridiculous presidential powers continues to grow with each passing presidency, be it Republican or Democrat. So before we ask whether one guy's policies or positions will be better than the other, let's ask first if they should even have the power to put those policies and positions into practice.

As the saying goes, “absolute power corrupts absolutely.” There will never be a choice between a strictly “good guy” and a strictly “bad guy,” just between handing the reins of the same power to a better man or a worse man. Those powers should not be any more tempting to abuse than they already are.