In times of relative comfort and security, many of us might lean toward emotion to vote for a candidate. But when we face hard choices and bewildering issues, we tend to become more pragmatic.
When life is good, it's easier to view a candidate by his or her warmth, appearance and rhetoric on emotional issues such as gay marriage, stem cell research, pro-choice or pro-life, prayer and Creationism in schools, regulation or deregulation, global warming and the plight of the polar bear. These issues have little effect on our daily lives.
When our very survival is threatened, when we face the stresses of reduced healthcare, lower wages, job losses, home foreclosures, the collapse of financial institutions and the looming bankruptcy of General Motors, we become more interested, more aware, more "reasoned" in investigating proposed solutions as well as the character of a candidate. How we "feel" about abortion seems less urgent than the stark reality of whether we lose our job and our home.
Reason is the reason the current President-Elect won the 2008 election. More of us looked at our wallets and found them empty while our costs for fundamental needs increased.
Many of us were slapped up side the head with the realization that government actually makes a difference in how we live, how we feed our children, whether we get medical attention, and if we're going to make it to 2012, the next election cycle.
But whether reason trumps emotion also depends on a recent political phenomenon: the elevation of one party's agenda to a religion. The Republican Party, once the party of small government, personal responsibility, fiscal prudence and protection of individual rights has morphed into the party of moral righteousness and champion of Fundamentalist Christian beliefs. There are Republicans who equate a Republican president with a Catholic pope. They subconsciously think of Republican Senators as bishops and House Representatives as priests who always speak the Word of God. These Officers of God are virtually infallible: their statements are beyond refute, their positions above reproach, and their goals divinely inspired. They can do no wrong.
This phenomenon is cultural, not political. Civility is based on reason and is but a thin veneer covering our tendency to judge and react from primal emotions. Religion promotes rational behavior over the instinctive, however, in a secular era, many of us place our beliefs as much in our political party as in our church.
During the 1980s, the Republican Party cleverly aligned itself with Christianity in order to reach Nixon's "silent majority." After all, 82% of Americans considered themselves practicing Christians. The Party's platform deemphasized issues of governing and emphasized moral imperatives . . . visceral matters of the heart and religion upon which voters were encouraged to believe they were closer to God if they voted for Republicans. The Bush-Cheney administration compounded that and imbued the Commander-In-Chief with divine provenance to start two wars, one of vengeance and the second for oil.
In the end, however, the GOP's agenda was revealed not as adhering to God's Law but, instead, to a peculiarly deceptive and avaricious craving to seize power and grant benefits to its own hierarchy. Not unlike, I might add, the Christian popes of the Dark Ages.
With our international reputation in tatters and our domestic economy shattered, that illusion has been dispelled. Still, the Republican Party's image of being enshrouded in robes of divinity caused a substantive number of the electorate to vote their emotions rather than their common sense.
Fortunately they were far fewer in number than the reasoned electorate.