What Are We Teaching Kids About Elections?

One week is all that remains, one week until the 2006 general election, one week to ask the question, what are we teaching our kids about elections?

I am a massive, huge, unabashed believer in elections and the American electoral system. Despite all its flaws (and there are more than a few), American republican democracy has produced the greatest nation on earth in less than 250 years. The wisdom of the American electorate, on average, has far out performed any prior governmental system, producing a nation with surprising stability and strength. Since Thomas Jefferson succeeded John Adams for the peaceful transfer of power between political parties, our nation has demonstrated that open election and a free electorate will always triumph, even though it may take a while. American elections work--it is as simple as that.

Yet when one looks at election season, we don't see anything positive. So here are some of the lessons we are teaching through action.

1. Going after a person's family and personal lives is fine. Although negative ads are a part of campaigning for office and there is nothing wrong with them, attack ads are stooping to a new low. Discussions of people's personal lives and the lives of their family are on display, no longer just records and policy positions. So the lesson for our kids, if you don't like a person's political outlook, it is okay to call them and their supporters racists or perverts. It is okay to tear a person down for a personal failing or something that happened long ago in their past.
2. If you want to win, acceptable tactics include lies, deceptions, quotations out of context and outright voter suppression. I know that politics is a bloodsport, with issues of power, agenda setting, policy preferences and all the rest involved. I have no problem getting dirty when the discussion deals with candidate records and positions--politics is still a game for adults. The honor in political battle has been lost. Tactics that rely on lies or distortions don't raise the level of debate or encourage activity. The worst offense in my view are attempts by any party to keep eligible voters from the polls. The next worst is pushing those not permitted to vote to do so. Such tactics destroy the integrity of the system. The lesson for our kids is that when it comes to things that are really important like leadership of a nation or a state, it is okay to lie and cheat in order to achieve them.
3. Assigning the blame onto others is fine. Warning, this is a partisan attack. For the past six years, all we have heard from certain segments of the Democratic party is that the 2000, the 2002 and 2004 elections were stolen by the GOP acting in concert with all kinds of groups in some grand conspiracy to keep power. Evidence of any such conspiracy, if it exists at all, remains circumstantial. But instead of accepting defeat honorably and working hard to convince the voters they are right, Democrats have continually declared that elections were stolen. The lesson, don't take responsibility for your own failures, someone else did this to you and you are within your rights to assign blame on those who won.
4. Elections are about money, polls and the latest scandal.If an alien were to land on our shores and view the media coverage of elections, they could hardly be blamed for believing that the only things that mattered were how much money the candidates raised, spent or have available, who is leading whom and by how much in the polls, and what is the latest dirt to be unearthed about some candidate or another. That is all that is projected and reported on. The media doesn't do much to look into candidate positions and record, merely parroting talking points issued by campaigns and breathlessly reporting on horse race issues that, in the long run, don't matter. The lesson, politics and elections are not about ideas or leadership, just empty numbers and scandals.
5. Voters are stupid.Both parties are particularly bad about treating voters as though they lack the intelligence to discern for themselves. While the short attention span theater of the modern media helps perpetuate this, the leading political parties now espouse slogans instead of sentences, tag lines instead of rhetoric and fear instead of logic and persuasion. Every speech is about getting that one great sound bite, leading to oversimplification about ideas and policy. You can't talk about complex issues like health care, Medicare, the war in Iraq, nuclear proliferation in 10 words on CNN. It takes more and the parties don't help by perpetuating soundbite campaigning. The lesson we teach our kids is that the power elite don't want you to think for yourselves because then you may start questioning that power, so just keep your head down and do what the power elite wants you to do.

In a time when education has risen to the top of the domestic agenda, when civics education, or rather the lack of it is deplored by columnists and teachers, everyone seems to forget that our children are still learning about politics and elections from the events around them. The examples and lessons we are teaching our kids through our actions during the elections surely fails to provide a good teaching experience. Our leaders, the people asking for our votes, attach their names to messages that highlight the worst of our humanity, at a time when we seek the best in our country to lead us through troubled times. Those kids who might seek office in the future are learning valuable lessons, just not lessons we want them to learn.

Elections teach all Americans, and right now the lessons do not reflect the best of America, or represent the honor and history of the American republic.