It's Politics, Not Personal

Today is another banner day, weatherwise, in Gainesville. I’m sitting here outside the Magnolia Parke Starbucks enjoying the slightly breezy, slightly cool, dry autumn air. Everyone in the media seems all wrapped up with the election, but people around me generally don’t bring it up in conversation, whether I’m one of the participants or just eavesdropping on others. And why should they? There’s a lot more to life than elections and the overblown campaigns leading up to them. Nevertheless, at this stage of the game, it’s tempting to get tightly wound up over who’s going to win and who’s going to lose, even if you haven’t been paying too much attention to national politics over the past year and a half or so.

It’s like that with sports, too. Sometimes there will be a football game between two teams, neither of which I care for. Like the game last Saturday night between Texas and Texas Tech. But I just picked Tech out of the air to root for, and wouldn’t you know it, the game turned out to be a nail-biter at the end. I was momentarily so excited when “my” team pulled off an improbable last-second victory. Until reality set in and I realized that I really didn’t like either team. But it’s usually more fun to pick sides in a contest and root for one over the other, even if you’re essentially flipping a coin to decide who to support. With the election, I feel differently.

Since early this spring, I expressed that I was voting for Barack Obama, and was also pleased to see John McCain get the GOP nomination. I still feel that way about both candidates. As the campaign wore on, I increasingly resented the attacks against Obama from the McCain side. And tended to see the attacks against McCain from “my” side as being legitimate. But I’m sure that, had I come down on the side of McCain in this presidential campaign, I would have felt the reverse.

Isn’t it funny, whether you are following a political election, a spectator sport, or even just a silly TV reality show, how you can identify so personally with the side you’re rooting for that you react emotionally to the attacks of the opposition? Nobody’s attacking ME on the campaign circuit. But the more I identify with my candidate, the more that seems so. My advice to all you folks out there is: if you haven’t voted yet, then vote by all means for the candidates and issues that matter to you. But don’t take it too personally if the people and propositions you support don’t win. You didn’t lose; they did. Besides, if the “bad guys” win out, wouldn’t that be a great incentive to start up your own blog to daily rant about how screwed up they are!