Your choice, your country, our problem

Election Day is fast approaching, and there is a tendency among some pundits to think that it can solve everything.

It can’t. Voting is a short-term solution to a long-term problem.

Or, rather, to many long-term problems — declining education, increasing deficits, disappearing industry, expanding government, border invasion, terrorism —  will those do for a start?

One of the worst of the long-term problems, however, is the long term of U.S. senators — six years — which almost guarantees that senators immediately after being elected develop a strong “independent streak” that means they are more likely to do what their party asks them to do than what their state voters expect them to do.

I’m not proposing changing the term of senators, but it is one more example of why the citizenry is restless, why “we the people” don’t trust “they the politicians,” and why nothing ever seems to get done to fix the real challenges facing this country.

Yep, there may be a Republican-led House of Representatives as a result of the elections on Nov. 2. There may even be a Republican-majority Senate, though that possibility is more remote. But let it never be said that a Republican Congress is a magic formula for “hope and change,” any more than a Democratic president was.

Even when there was a Republican House and a Republican-led Senate during most of the first six years of the George W. Bush administration, there was no hope and very little change for the better. It was politics as usual.

Of course, hope springs eternal in the human breast, so Republicans and some independents are actually being seduced into thinking that simple solutions to fundamental problems are going to be found in the next few years.

Would that it were so.

But anyone who thinks that a GOP majority in Congress is going to “fundamentally transform” America from the dysfunctional mess it is today is likely to be as disappointed in 2012 as the 2008 Obama voters are in 2010. Think of it this way: If our representatives don’t feel obligated to represent us, then what exactly do we as a people base our hopes for change on?

That’s why the Tea Party movement is so adamant on not being co-opted by either political party. At this point, the movement has pinned its hopes on Republicans, but Republicans who ignore the people will be just as unpopular as Democrats.

That point is met with skepticism by Democrats, of course, who continue to view the Tea Party movement as “the enemy.” It is often asked by Democrats or their surrogates in the media why Tea Party activists, if they are truly non-partisan, did not protest against George W. Bush’s spending policies. The answer is simple and two-fold: First, the terrorism of Sept. 11 and two ensuing wars diverted our attention from domestic problems to a large extent. Second, the American public (like the political establishment) had largely bought into the notion that effective governance must be rooted in compromise.

Say what you will about him, President Obama did everyone a favor by teaching us that you could govern quite effectively without ever compromising your principles. He pushed through health-care reform over the objection of the American people and with virtually no support from Republicans. He did what he thought was right, and he did what he told the American people he would do when they elected him.

Now he will reap the consequences.

At least we think he will. It all depends on how long the memory of voters is. In Montana, Sen. Jon Tester might be in trouble this year because of his votes for health-care reform, Cass Sunstein and energy. But he isn’t running for re-election until 2012 so it’s entirely possible that voters may forget those votes. In the meantime, Tester — who got elected on a platform of “making Washington, D.C., more like Montana” — has been spending his “safe year” raising money for very liberal Democratic senators like Russ Feingold of Wisconsin and Barbara Boxer of California.

Sorry, Jon, but if you really wanted to make Washington more like Montana, you would be campaigning against Boxer and Feingold, not for them.

But that’s not the way politics works, is it? It’s all about getting elected — which brings us back to the short-term solution we started with: Election Day.

Do your duty; make your choice. But do yourself a favor. Don’t vote based on what candidates tell you — vote based on their record. If they don’t have a record, vote based on their party’s record because it is a certainty that they are going to vote with their party most of the time, no matter how “independent” they promise you they are.

It would be best for all of us if every politician were willing to state their principles boldly when standing for election, then stick to them when voting on legislation. Don’t say one thing in October, and another thing after the voting is over in November. I believe that is what all voters want to see.

But so far it hasn’t happened.

I think, as much as anything, that is why the Tea Party movement has arisen. It has become the institutional memory of “we the people” to hold accountable our elected representatives. That may be the only hope we have that we can restore honor or sanity in our country.

If you want to solve the long-term problems, don’t keep electing the people that caused the problems. That goes for George Bush-era Republicans as well as Obama-era Democrats.

Don’t let them off the hook just because six years has passed. If you don’t elect true patriots to the Senate and other offices, people who put their country first and their party a distant second, then we are six years closer to collapse.

Remember, the only real cure for our country’s long-term problems is a long memory — voters need to sniff out the phony politicians who can’t be trusted to do what they say, and replace them with statesmen who will lead the people BEFORE the election and follow through AFTERWARDS.