In about 200 days, Americans will head to the polls to select our next president. Whether it’s Donald Trump, Sen. Bernie Sanders, Sen. Ted Cruz, Hillary Clinton, Gov. John Kasich or a dark horse candidate coming from a convention, the winner of November’s election will wield significant influence over our country in perhaps the most polarized point in our history.
This has been the ugliest election in our lifetimes, maybe in American history. As Marylanders vote in the primaries this Tuesday, we need to ask ourselves what will happen to people — from Bernie Bros to those riding the Trump Train — once we have elected a new president. Will voters who are filled with such anger and distaste for our government and who are so committed to their candidates quietly settle back into their daily lives and forget about what happened?
I doubt it. We live in a polarized time. 49 percent of Republicans and 33 percent of Democrats would be upset if their child married someone from the opposite political party, up from just 5 percent and 4 percent respectively in 1960. More than one-fourth of Democrats and Republicans believe that the opposite party constitutes a threat to the well-being of our country. This way of thinking, in which Americans have come to increasingly dislike someone based on their party affiliation, has created an overly adversarial and combative political environment, which I think will be driven further by this election. In a two-party system, this way of thinking makes dialogue and compromise impossible, and the response that both parties have had is to dig their feet in even harder and continue their finger pointing and name calling. Government has been unable to create any major policy changes over the last several years, and we should be afraid of what our future looks like if this continues. How will our government be able to respond to the next recession, a war or an outbreak of disease?
It is imperative that the next president be someone who has shown their ability to work with others, and stood by the importance of bipartisanship throughout this campaign cycle. We need someone who is committed to bringing people together, for the sake not only of effective governance, but for the spirit of our democratic society. I believe the only candidate who fits this description is John Kasich. Why Kasich, and not any of the other candidates?
We can easily eliminate three candidates right off the bat. Trump and Sanders, the so-called populists of the campaign season, have based their campaigns and messages around the idea that someone or some group (the rich, the establishment, the Republicans, the Democrats, the Muslims, the Mexicans, China, free trade advocates, etc.) is the source of all of our nation’s woes. Trump and Sanders make the same basic claim: If I’m president, I will be able to ram my agenda through despite any objections, and anyone who does object is part of the problem. How either of these men, who at the very heart of their messages scorn compromise and dialogue, could bring us together is impossible to say.
Cruz, while perhaps not a populist in the same sense, is not much different in his finger-pointing and partisanship. The man’s only true “accomplishment” in his legislative service has been shutting down the government over President Obama’s health care law. His strong ideological stances on everything from gay marriage to immigration to taxes to abortion combined with his advocacy for patrolling Muslim neighborhoods and barring entry of Muslim refugees from Syria demonstrate his inability to budge on most issues. Cruz has made his career by pointing to Democrats (and any Republican willing to stand in the same room as a Democrat) as the problem; we should seriously doubt his willingness or ability to bring people together.
Clinton, despite coming in as perhaps the most moderate candidate in the campaign, is only a marginal improvement over Cruz, Sanders, and Trump. Sanders has clearly pushed her further to the left on a host of issues and spun the narrative that she is a bought politician who flip-flops on any issue that will restore her popularity. This has led to the widespread notion that she is dishonest and deceitful. According to a Washington Post-ABC News poll, 57 percent of Americans do not believe she is honest or trustworthy. The case she makes for herself is that she will able to win in November and that Sanders is too far to the left and too vague on many of his proposals. But Clinton’s claim is not that she would work with Republicans to accomplish her agenda, but that she is strong enough to defeat any Republicans who would get in her way. This approach to governing, combined with her perceived lack of trustworthiness and honesty, make it impossible to claim that Clinton has the ability or the desire to bring our country together.
Kasich, however, is different. Throughout his service as a congressman and a governor, Kasich has shown the ability to work with Republicans and Democrats to produce results. With former President Bill Clinton, Kasich (then the Chairman of the House Budget Committee) passed the only balanced budget of our lifetimes, and as governor of Ohio he worked across the aisle to expand Medicaid. Even on issues where Kasich did not get his way (a telling example was his fight to lessen the power of unions in Ohio), he accepted the results and moved on.
In the primary season, Kasich has repeatedly stated that he will not “take the lowest road to the highest office.” He has consistently stressed his ability to bring people together, even as his primary opponents have received more attention by lambasting the other side. He hasn’t capitulated on his views or his willingness to work across the aisle (see Clinton) even though it would make him more popular, and he has stayed above the name calling and accusations that the other candidates have made as the hallmarks of their campaign. Through his words and actions, Kasich has shown the ability to bring people together.
I hope that we can all agree that what we need as a country is some degree of healing, of bringing people together, of ending the overly adversarial and combative nature of our politics. Why have Congress and the president failed to achieve anything significant over the last several years? Because Americans of different political persuasions loathe one another. Not just in Washington, D.C., but across the country. All we hear on the news and in our social lives is the partisanship from those who feed the fire, who point at the other side as the only barrier to success in our country and fail to recognize that they may be part of the problem.
We have four candidates convinced that they can waltz in and make radical changes, the other party be damned. We should ask ourselves, aren’t people like Sanders, Clinton, Cruz and Trump the reason why nothing gets done in our government in the first place? American democracy doesn’t entitle whoever gets 51 percent of the vote to do as they please, and such action wouldn’t be possible in today’s polarized environment.
Without compromise, dialogue and a willingness to listen to others, democratic government cannot function. Many of our founding fathers and our greatest presidents understood this.
But today, Kasich seems to be the only person in the race for the presidency who understands this fundamental fact, and therefore is the only one with a chance to heal our divided country. We would be right to remember it this Tuesday and beyond.
Sam Wallace is a senior government and politics major. He can be reached at swallacedbk@gmail.com.
