Politics, a love story (Washington Post, 11/5/2024)
A dark and ghastly campaign comes to an end. Can the country overcome the ugliness?
November 5, 2024 at 8:55 p.m. EST
I met Karen Ball on a presidential campaign. A bunch of reporters were sitting in the sunshine of a Florida winter’s day waiting for candidate Bill Clinton to finish talking to someone, which was always a holdup. I used this languid interlude to gaze admiringly on a young woman with porcelain skin and a tumble of hair held back from her face by an overmatched scrunchie. The longer I looked, the more I wanted to keep looking, but at last I turned to a colleague and asked, “Who is that?”
A dang good political reporter, that’s who, a keen sports fan, a demon at cards, a boon companion. After that 1992 campaign, we went through seven more presidential elections together. We were married in time for the second one. We had two kids for the third one and four kids by the fourth.
For number nine, I’ve been on my own. On the day after Thanksgiving last year, Karen woke in a chipper mood, told me she loved me, and died of an apparent pulmonary embolism — a massive blood clot in the lungs — three hours later.
Spouses in journalism are a pretty common phenomenon, and I suppose the danger is that you might reinforce one another’s biases and blind spots. Like everyone, Karen had some biases. For instance, she preferred her politicians funny and a little roguish. But if she had blind spots, I never found them. She could spy a hole the size of a gnat’s eye in someone’s story from 50 feet away.
I’ve tried to channel that sharp perception over the past year as Americans poured billions into trying to change each others’ minds, waging another 50-50 election in this 50-50 nation. And the recurring hole in the story that I’ve glimpsed through her eyes is the human face of politics. Everything has been blown up to epic proportions this time around. The rhetoric has been apocalyptic: end of democracy, end of America, brownshirts on the march, the world’s garbage can, even the pets aren’t safe. Oh, dark, dark, dark.
Karen understood that politics in the United States — even at the presidential level — is not about one huge decision on the part of The People; it is about tens of millions of individual decisions by regular folks. She knew a multitude of people and, unlike a lot of reporters, she found them all interesting. She liked to talk with them and (can you imagine?!) listen to them, and she often found that their politics, however baffling or strange to her, did not define them.
She had neighbors and friends who voted for Vice President Kamala Harris in this election and others who voted for former president Donald Trump. Same with loved ones and family. What she saw in them was something fundamental to America’s nature: that who we choose as president is important — but it is not the only important thing. The president does not determine our future; we make that for ourselves.
Having covered city halls, state legislatures and Congress, Karen had a feel for the everydayness of politics, the way presidents and senators and governors and mayors come and go while the things they bicker over remain largely unchanged. The schools could always be better. The cities could always be safer. The economy could always be stronger. The world could always be quieter. As urgent as your vote might be, just as pressing is what you do with your time and energy: Do you make one classroom better, one block friendlier, one business stronger, one household kinder?
Politics is how we live together. And that’s not an every-four-years question.
All the hyperbole, the doom and gloom, is a business model, a strategy for success in the marketplace of eyeballs and screen time. Endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights, Americans are egged on in the pursuit of unhappiness. The other insight I’ve tried to hold onto from Karen is paradoxical: The reason to avoid hype and exaggeration, the reason to keep politics on an individual human scale, is precisely because it is so important.
Political outcomes can be made so apocalyptic that they actually bring on an ending. Stakes can be raised with such profligacy that to pay them is ruinous. Societies can fail; nations can crumble. It happens all the time around the world.
Karen often told the story of the year her grandfather’s little crop failed in northern Arkansas and his children — Karen’s dad and his sisters — nearly starved. From that grinding poverty, her dad built a working-class life. In the days when women’s liberation was more slogan than reality, Karen and her sisters (along with one brother) inhaled the sense that they were free to aspire and choose their own paths.
Not every family goes from famine to a seat on Air Force One in two generations. But Karen was grateful for the country that made it possible. She understood why people come to the United States from all over the world to seek the same opportunities and freedoms. She knew this gift was too precious to toy with.
As I write these words, the last votes are being cast in the eastern United States. I am hoping for one outcome and dreading the other. I think that describes most of the country.
If this truly is, as so many have said, the most important election in decades, my sidekick would say the most important thing about it will be what comes next. Tens of millions of Americans have decisions to make about how they do politics tomorrow, and tomorrow. Will they continue to sell their unhappiness to the coarsest bidders, to dehumanize their dissenting neighbors, to assume the worst about others, to exaggerate the nation’s flaws and troubles and court some Armageddon? Or will they take their politics in the customary way, one day, one problem, one compromise at a time?
The election is over. It’s only the end of the world if we choose to make it so.
Opinion by David Von Drehle
David Von Drehle is a deputy opinion editor for The Post and writes a weekly column.