You Can’t Always Get What You Want

You can’t always get what you want
You can’t always get what you want
You can’t always get what you want
But if you try sometimes, well, you just might find
You get what you need

From the Song “You Can’t Always Get What You Want” – Keith Richards and Mick Jagger

You may or may not have noticed that there have been very few pearls of wisdom from the Commonwealth of Common Sense lately. I tried a couple of times during the election season to write, but it just would not come. I suppose it could be that “writer’s block” that I sometimes hear about. But I think there was more. I kept coming back to the word “common” in the name of the blog. I just really started to question if what I thought made sense was in any meaningful way “in common” with other people. Oh, you can always find SOMEBODY who will agree with you, I guess. But I really became convinced that there is a significant part of our population that I really do not understand.

Now, before you go off telling me that I am just another one of those urban, elitist, over-politically-correct, socialistic Biden-supporting snobs let me hasten to add, I am not even trying to say that my understanding, my world view, is the right one. It is true that I voted for Joe Biden for president, but I am totally ready to admit that I don’t have the corner on truth. It just troubled me that I was so out of step with over 70,000,000 of my fellow Americans. That’s right, seventy MILLION people voted for Donald Trump compared to only about five million more who voted for Joe Biden. Maybe that is always the way elections turn out. There is never going to be a winner that is that far ahead of his or her election opponent.

But the numbers sort of intimidated me a little bit. How could what I think be so far away from what so MANY of my friends and neighbors think. It scared me to wonder what I DO have in common with this huge group of people. And the separation is a HARD separation. There seems to be very little inclination from either side to try to find middle ground. That would be compromise, a concept that is reviled by both sides.

As we totter in the no-man’s-land of the period between the election and the inauguration, I was very much ill at ease. I was sure that one or the other would be president. It certainly seemed like Biden was the clear-cut winner based on the election data that I had seen. But the troubling thing was that whatever way it turned out, half of the country would be outraged. Trump supporters would say that the election was stolen from him by corrupt election officials. I will say more on corrupt election officials later. If the Trump campaign convinced several state courts that for whatever reason their results could not be certified and HE prevailed there would be howls of complaint, demonstrations etc. etc. from Biden supporters. I sort of felt that there could be no real winner is this mess.

So, for the first time in a long time I must say that I was NOT optimistic about the future of our country. I felt that we would be headed for something much closer to an autocracy if President Trump were to sit for another four years (or more – he has talked about attempting to extend his stay to a THIRD term). I feared what he would do. But if Biden were elected, I thought that there would be four years of contested actions and gridlock with Republican resistance at every turn, but MORE IMPORTANTLY that seventy million people would have no confidence in their president. Republicans can argue that this is exactly what happened to Trump when he was elected. I think this is a little different in that during the first two years of Trump’s term he had a Republican House and a Republican Senate. Adding it all up I determined to let the “Commonwealth of Common Sense” ride into the sunset, to close the site and cocoon.

And then as if God-sent (maybe it was), I read the recent editorial by D. J. Tice from the Strib. For those of you who haven’t read his work, Tice is a conservative voice in a mostly liberal newspaper. I read his writing faithfully, but I must tell you that while I most often agree with or at least understand what he says, what he writes often irritates me. I guess maybe he is making me think of things in a different way. This time Tice helped me to believe that maybe I am NOT so in-step with some of the 75 million who voted for Biden and maybe NOT so far out-of-step with many of the 70 million who voted for Trump. I won’t replay the whole article but the following excerpts I think are the most important to understanding what just happened in our country.

While the bragging, trash-talking, semiliterate tough guy shtick obviously has an enthusiastic core audience, many other Americans among Trump’s 70 million voters merely put up with his barbarisms, and only with some difficulty.
What they’re enthusiastic about is Trump as a living, snarling repudiation to America’s smug, know-it-all professional, managerial, academic, bureaucratic urban elite — those self-anointed sophisticates who disdain, as much as anything, Trump’s unembarrassed declarations of love for America and respect for everyday, working-class Americans, with their admiration for their nation’s history, ideals and traditional culture.
Many millions, in short, dislike much about Trump, but dislike even more about his enemies.

And then further:

The reality is that this week’s apparent result is exactly the outcome the nation needed — but did not seem likely to get. It’s the kind of moderate, difference-splitting division of power that frustrates radicals of all stripes and demands — egad — compromise for government to get anything done.
Given the proud peacocks who presume to govern us, gridlock is often underrated. Voters last week contrived to at once reject Donald Trump while also humbling and hobbling those delirious with hatred of Trump and drunk with admiration of their own virtue.
America needed to jettison this president — his coarseness, his cruelty, his dishonesty, his addiction to strife. But it needed to do it without endorsing and empowering the leftist fanaticism that threatens to stampede a weary Joe Biden into unaffordable expansions of government largesse and power, and imprudent remodelings of constitutional structures. The results seem likely to both require and reinforce Biden’s moderate impulses.

Before concluding, a word about election fraud – as many of you know I spent more than half of my career working for cities. Cities and townships are the first and I would argue the most important layers in the election process. I will give personal testimony that in all of those years I NEVER EVEN ONCE came across anything that was one iota short of total compliance with the legal requirements of impartiality. I can’t recite all the regulations governing elections in our state – the statutes are hundreds of pages long. But I would talk about just one – the appointment of election judges. Local governments are REQUIRED to have equal numbers of Democrats and Republicans serving as election judges in every precinct. I find that MOST people either don’t know that or more probably haven’t even thought about it. These faithful volunteers are required to have hours and hours of training where the impartiality and accuracy themes are pounded over and over. And they get to watch each other doing their jobs – that is the intent.

The idea that people from this group of civic minded people would conspire, in hundreds of thousands of precincts across the country in some controlled way to throw an election one way or another is unfathomable to me. There has been discussion of the absentee voting process. These votes are counted under the SAME regulations as regular voting. Now, when 150,000,000 votes are cast, there are going to be some weird situations. Handling of these weird situations can certainly be scrutinized. But in the overall scheme of things they are infinitesimal and the likelihood of them deciding an outcome is similarly infinitesimal. Trying to use these extremely rare abnormalities to question the overall validity of an election, implying that the process is fatally flawed to me is inexcusable and attacks the very foundation of our country.

SOOOOOO, the Commonwealth is NOT dissolving. My perspective is corrected. I think Tice is right, the election probably turned out the way that is best for the country. The fractious elements of our elected officials are going to HAVE to find a way to get along and to get things done. As I have said in the past, call me a cock-eyed optimist, but I think they will.