Another election season ends … thank goodness

Frontiersman editorial board

Sometime tonight the nation will share a huge collective sigh. The 2004 political campaign season will have reached its zenith and at least most of the races will be decided. It has been one of the most bitterly fought, venomous races in recent memory. The effects have been a polarized electorate and a country that lacks confidence in nearly every candidate. Most of us have spent the last week on sensory overload, wishing it would all just end. You can only endure so much animus, so many lies.

On the national level we've been subjected to a bitter debate between President George W. Bush and Sen. John Kerry. Most of the attention has been focused on the war in Iraq, Kerry accusing Bush of going to war for the wrong reasons and for unnecessarily alienating some of our most important allies. Bush claims that Kerry is vacillating, incapable of making the tough decisions that will lead us to victory.

The challenge for voters is that both are probably right on some level. We're left to choose between a president who would lead us into an unwarranted war with no plan to get out and a president who might wrestle with an inner debate until it was too late to act. On the domestic side, Kerry says Bush will send your job overseas and Bush says Kerry will keep your job here but tax you into the poorhouse. The truth is the president has minimal control over the economy and always gets either too much credit or too much blame.

On the local level we've been pounded with accusations about where candidates live, or don't live, charges about closed-door meetings, pandering to special interests and about ties to extreme environmental groups. Many candidates have bragged ad nauseam about how many doors they've pounded and how many people they've met, as if knocking on doors and spouting rhetoric were critical qualifications for the job.

It's over. Thank goodness. All that's left is to vote, once again, for the lesser evil. All that's left is the hangover, during which we'll all wonder out loud what has gone wrong with our electoral process, and why we can't get higher quality candidates to run. We also may be left with the lawsuits that have become a tradition in presidential races. We're still fortunate to live in a place where the people get to choose, but we're often saddled with uninspiring choices. If that weren't true, today we'd be celebrating the right to vote rather than cheering for the end of the process.