TIME - Man of the Year/CompactPublishing-TimeMagazine-TimeManOfTheYear-Win31MSDOS.iso/moy/102692/1026640.000

Text File | 1993-04-08 | 5.9 KB | 120 lines

                                                                                ESSAY, Page 92

Hold It! Don't Get Out the Vote


By George J. Church


    The deafening chorus has begun: register and vote. It's
the essence of our freedom. It's your civic duty. If you don't
vote, you're lazy, ignorant, apathetic, damn near a traitor.
This message, shrieked every four years, has not been
persuasive. The percentage of eligible voters who go to the
polls keeps dropping toward the 50% mark. But the result is
greater hysteria.

    A better response would be to shut up. Driving reluctant
citizens to the polls out of some vague sense of guilt is no
accomplishment; they would cast ignorant ballots, impelled by
emotion or bias, that would further lower the tone of American
campaigns. The freedom to ignore politics is a democratic
liberty almost as precious as the freedom to participate. And
for many intelligent, well-informed citizens who care
passionately about the nation's future, not voting can be a
principled strategy of protest.

    None of this argues against efforts to make registration
and voting easier, like "motor voter" laws and reduction of
length-of-residence requirements. Citizens who want to vote
should not have any barriers put in their way.

    But what of those who could easily pull the lever but
won't bestir themselves? They tend to be people who are too
wrapped up in their daily life to pay much attention to outside
matters -- TV, sports and rock music perhaps excepted. If
incessant nagging did push them into the polling booths, there
is no warrant for believing it would also provoke them to study
the issues and the candidates' backgrounds. At a bad best, their
votes would be prompted by some irrelevant emotional factor, a
candidate's age or winning smile, perhaps.

    These also are the people most susceptible to cleverly
crafted but dishonest attack ads. I am thinking of the woman
who, four years ago, told me she had just learned, obviously
from a Bush campaign TV spot, that Michael Dukakis "believes in
turning murderers loose." She was uncertain whether she would
vote; let us hope she didn't and won't. Worst of all, campaigns
that play on racial animosity might have a dangerous appeal to
people who now tend to stay home on Election Day. Bigotry and
nonvoting both correlate with low income and education.

    There are, of course, intelligent citizens of goodwill who
also ignore politics. One of the glories of our society is that
they can do so safely. The engineer, chemist or doctor hard put
to keep up with the demands of his profession for study and
knowledge; the artist, musician or scholar totally engrossed in
her field -- in a totalitarian society they would not be allowed
to be apolitical. To advance in their professions they would
have to join The Party and devote some time to propagandizing
for it. In a democratic country a physicist can pass up any
participation in politics in order to spend every possible
moment pondering the structure of the atom, and may well serve
society better by doing so.

    But not all nonvoters are uninformed or uninterested.
There are some -- hard to count, but intuition would suggest a
large and growing number -- who study, and think deeply about,
the issues. They listen to the candidates. And they find none
to whom they would entrust the future of the country.

    No one person can speak for them, since they -- we -- are
moved largely by an aversion to groupthink. But perhaps my
reasoning is not unrepresentative. I believe, on the basis of
considerable experience in writing about economics and a good
deal of careful thought, that the federal deficit is a menace
that if not curbed will bring disaster on the nation. Love of
country argues against damaging it by voting for someone who
will make the deficit even worse, and in all likelihood, either
George Bush or Bill Clinton would. (Bush's record speaks for
itself. Clinton proposes big spending increases that by his own
figures would well exceed the piddling tax boosts and
defense-expenditure cuts he promises; given that, his talk of
deficit reduction through economic growth is 1980-vintage Ronald
Reagan voodoo.) Ross Perot's economic program makes sense, but
Perot has given evidence that he lacks the judgment, balance and
character to be President. Casting a protest vote for someone
who has no chance to win is fine, but casting one for a
candidate the voter would not want to win is unconscionable.

    The conventional advice is to choose the lesser evil. Even
if Bush and Clinton would both be bad, a patriot should vote
for the one he thinks would hurt the country least. It is a
powerful argument, and one not fully refuted by observing
(though it is the truth) that lesser-of-two-evils votes are
increasingly misinterpreted as satisfaction with politics as it
exists. Won't nonvotes be taken that way too? Won't the winner
be fortified in the belief that the way to get elected is to
keep pandering to the special interests that will not tolerate
any serious attack on the deficit (or whatever other problem
might most concern a troubled citizen), since those who dislike
this kind of electioneering don't bother to vote? That is a
serious risk. But there is a difference in the size of the
winner's (to be realistic, probably Clinton's) margin. A
15-point victory might encourage him -- and cow his opponents
-- into thinking that the public so loves his promises of $1
worth of government for 76 cents paid in taxes that he must
produce exactly that. A much narrower win just might put him on
notice that he has a mandate only to change things for the
better, and that his ability to do so is sufficiently distrusted
that he dare not purchase a one-year recovery and longer-term
disaster by pumping up the economy and the deficit. It is a
slender hope, but what other do we have?