Time to come down off the "high"

With the election over, journalists, pundits, commentators, most politicians and most importantly, the President-Elect, Barack Obama, have all begun to scale back the rhetoric. These professionals, for the most part, understand there is an important distinction between campaigning for political office and holding that office.

The words, thoughts and ideas expressed in a campaign are idealistic, crafted to appeal to a candidate’s constituency’s hope and dreams. A political candidate also knows the rhetoric of campaigning will rarely become policy. Therefore he or she must scale back the expectations of their constituencies otherwise those who carried them to office will turn on them when they realize their idealized hopes will not be attained, or at least to the degree they were led to believe during the campaign.

To his credit, President elect Obama began lowering expectations in the final week of his campaign when it became clear that barring unforeseen and hugely inaccurate polling, he would most likely become this nation’s 44th President. The difficulty for Obama is that most of the constituency he has courted, the youth vote and the wealth envy vote, do not understand the difference between campaigning and governing.

Political candidates have since the beginning of politics promised far more than they can deliver. In the form of government in this nation, that fact is inherent in our Constitutional Republic. You see, this is not a democracy, despite the misguided belief perpetuated by the educational system and the media.

Sadly, the constituencies of President-Elect Obama have drunk the “Kool-aid” of “Change” and truly believe that their candidate and our soon to be President will enact all that he has promised. Many remain in “campaign mode” ravenously attacking anyone expressing ideas and opinions even slightly different from their own. They look for attack and disparagement in even the most benign of comment.

Their youthful idealism and expectations, their lack of understanding of the American political process, will lead them to disillusion and disappointment. At the same time, their inability to tone down their rhetoric and attacks will serve only to alienate them from both those who may agree with them as well as those who don’t.

Their friends, families and fellow employees will all soon tire of the constant argumentative attitude and newly empowered political groupies will soon find themselves not only disappointed in their expectations, but distanced from those who would have otherwise been there for them when they finally realize their candidate cannot fulfill the all promises made and their government has failed them despite their hope for change.

"We are all in the same boat on a stormy sea and
we owe each other a terrible loyalty." - G. K. Chesterson