Morning After: The Results So Far : Is the process up to the challenge?

What if they gave an election and no one came?

That didn’t happen yesterday, of course. But if the general voter trend line continues its southward descent, it’s theoretically conceivable that the last voter will turn the lights out in the polling booth sometime well prior to the year, oh, 3000.

TURNOFF-TURNOUT: The reason is fairly simple. This was another one of those turnoff-turnout elections. In the nation at large, people were not so much inspired to vote as guilt-driven to vote. Nothing is inherently wrong with guilt as a motivator, of course, just as there’s nothing in the Constitution that requires candidates to be intelligent and the issues rationally presented.

But it would be nice.

Nor is there anything in the Constitution requiring television and radio ads to educate and illuminate, rather than demean or infuriate. In California the airwaves quickly became the functional equivalent of a second-stage smog alert. Who can forget the kid with cancer in the TV ad urging you to vote Yes on Big Green? (Blunt translation: Vote no and support cancer). Or, in North Carolina, the TV ad of the white man getting the termination letter because of hiring quotas (Blunt translation: vote for the white candidate Jesse Helms or lose your job to them) . And notice how candidates everywhere were falling all over themselves--almost stepping happily over dead bodies--to aver they would be the quickest to use the death penalty.

True, there’s nothing in the Constitution to stop this kind of deception (the First Amendment doesn’t get into quality control), and there’s no reason for candidates to absolutely require their handlers to market them as a commodity any more magisterial than a bar of soap or an automobile.

But it would be nice.

MAIL CALL: And if many voters across the nation were turned off by the quality of the election, in California some turnoff was attributable to the sheer bulk of the ballot this time: In some locales the ballot seemed a life’s work. No surprise that about 20% of voters availed themselves of the opportunity to go the absentee route. With the ballot like a political-science take-home exam, a large part of the state in effect decided to mail in the election.

No doubt there’ll be a groundswell of public support for initiative reform. Not only were there too many propositions, too many of them were too complex, absurdly detailed, often baffling. Taken all together, the 28 state ballot propositions in California were a bit like one large video game--poisonous meanies looking to gobble up the good guys. Nobody is asking for a pristine election done to the fine polish of, say, the erudite debating principles of the Oxford Union. Life is messy and politics can be, too.

But is it too much to ask politics somehow to rise to the occasion of the challenge of our troubled time? It’s true that while Americans are guaranteed life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, they aren’t guaranteed a system in which the cream necessarily rises to the top.

But it would be nice.