Lately, when I think about the upcoming presidential election cycle, the chorus to an old Stealers Wheel song keeps bouncing around my brain: “Clowns to the left of me, jokers to the right / Here I am, stuck in the middle / …And I’m wondering what it is I should do.”
You remember the Middle, don’t you? That’s the place where we still believe in mutual respect, fiscal responsibility and a commitment to doing the right thing because it’s the right thing to do. Where we’re not impressed by bombastic and combative politicians who wield social media like a sword and a shield to deflect critics and defend some kind of self-defined moral high ground. A place where we still believe our nation’s greatest strengths are rooted in cooperation, compromise and common sense.
And it’s a place that’s becoming increasingly marginalized in a country dominated by reality TV politics that work to shove both parties to the extremes in the name of rescuing the American Dream from that other guy.
How did we get to a place in this country where anybody who disagrees with our political point of view is accused of hating America? The political battle cries range from the rich wielding too much influence over the country to the poor sucking the life out of it, and the solutions vary just as widely.
In 2017, the Republicans did a lot of bragging about passing a $1.5 trillion tax cut, and then pushed through a federal budget with a $1 trillion deficit. And with the national debt reaching $23 trillion last October, how does it make any sense, whatsoever, to decide that this is a good time to cut federal revenue? What ever happened to the concept of fiscal responsibility? And why isn’t anybody tweeting about that?
Now, several Democratic presidential hopefuls are touting plans that include providing Americans with a guaranteed income, tuition-free college and Medicare for All, claiming that they’ll get the richest Americans to pick up the bulk of the tab. While that plan may look good on a bumper sticker, I’m just a little skeptical that anybody can actually pull that one off.
The U.S. tax code has more than 6,500 pages, and almost 4 million words, and it’s still growing – and I’m fairly confident in claiming that most of those pages were not lobbied into place to benefit the middle income brackets.
So if we’re banking on the rich people of this country opening up their wallets to pay their fair share, well I’m also fairly confident that the people they pay to manage their fortunes and figure out their taxes will make good use of the well-crafted loopholes and tax shelters tucked away within those 6,500 pages. (I mean, how else could Amazon, which made $11 billion dollars in 2018, end up not only paying $0 in federal income tax, but also getting a $129 million rebate?)
Maybe they’re counting on being able to engineer sweeping changes in the tax codes, but I kinda doubt it – too many Washington power brokers owe too many wealth contributors to allow that to happen. Ideology only takes you so far in a Congress where keeping your job has become more important than doing your job.
So, where does that leave us? I had to hold my nose to vote in the last presidential election, and I don’t relish the thought of doing that again this year. And, apparently, I’m not alone. A national poll conducted last year showed that almost 40% of Americans think it’s time for a third political party. The NBC/Wall Street Journal survey shows that 38% of respondents think the two-party system is broken, the highest number since the poll was initiated in 1995. Just one in 10 respondents were able to agree that the two-party system is working fairly well.
In New Hampshire, a little over 40% of voters are registered undeclared, or independent, while nationwide the number is slightly lower at 38%. So people are wanting to keep their options open. But where does that get us? Without a definable third-party platform and a viable candidate, we’re still left, in many cases, to choose between the political extremes.
I was driving through Hopkinton the other day and saw a red, white and blue 2020 election sign in somebody’s front yard that endorsed “Any Well-Adjusted Adult.” Maybe that’s the best we can hope for. Maybe between the clowns and the jokers there’ll emerge a candidate with enough common sense, political courage and personal integrity to be able to convince both parties to consider the possibility that the quickest pathway to true progress in America might just lie straight down the middle.
Maybe, but I’m not holding my breath.
(David Moore lives in Concord.)
(Correction: An earlier version of this column misstated the amount of the national debt.)