Quest for a Voter Who Believes in Civility

I’d committed myself Tuesday morning to finding someone of voting age who didn’t intensely dislike -- oh, let’s use the word, “hate” -- either George Bush or John Kerry.

With tensions mounting a week before election day and Americans being told daily how divided they are and how duplicitous the presidential candidates and their backers are, was it possible to find a voter who didn’t actually hate either man?

Democrats didn’t hate Dwight Eisenhower. Republicans didn’t hate Jimmy Carter. They didn’t even hate Michael Dukakis. What happened to those good ol’ days?

Trolling Beach Boulevard in north Orange County, I stopped several people and explained my premise. “That’s not me,” said a woman in a pickup truck outside a record store. I didn’t ask whether it was Bush or Kerry she hated. Another man described his contempt for Kerry and said he’d instilled the same feelings in his dog. At least people haven’t lost their senses of humor.

An hour into the quest, this sobering thought dawned: in this presidential race, everybody hates somebody.

Then, Charlene Gorbet answered the door of her mobile home in Anaheim. She’s 23 and just got to town last weekend from Northern California with her boyfriend, an apprentice lineman. As her boxer Roscoe licked my ear, Gorbet listened to my premise and nodded knowingly. “I think everyone expects one person to be able to come in and change everything and make everything right,” she says. “That’s an illusion. No one is going to please everyone.”

We hadn’t talked long before she began praising President Bush. “I think he’s not afraid to fight for America’s freedom,” she says. “His morals, his values; I think he’s going after what’s right.”

But you don’t hate Kerry? Not at all, Gorbet says. “He has some good ideas. I think he’s a decent person. It’s not like I’m against his ideas; I just don’t think he has the aggressiveness to really protect us and serve us as a really good commander in chief.”

If he were elected? “I don’t think he’d be as strong as Bush, but I don’t think he’d be horrible, either.”

Such measured language is largely foreign to presidential politics, which resembles blood feuds more than tests of ideas. Nor does Gorbet expect a return to civility any time soon.

“That time is long gone,” she laments. “People are just so set in their ways. It’s their way or the highway .... That’s the way it is. It’s like that in everyday life.”

Gorbet, who is from Susanville, says “hate” is a word she tries to avoid. “When I grew up, hate was a word you reserved for something you were very passionate about.”

That’s how people feel about the candidates, I suggest. “They can’t know Kerry or Bush,” she counters. “How can they say that? They know their opinions, but you have to really know a person, the kind of person they are, what they do in certain circumstances to be able to say you hate someone.”

Even accounting for voters who use “hate” loosely, it’s clear that many mean it literally. “A lot of it is the campaign,” Gorbet says, “and that’s both of them. They’re so busy mudslinging and trash-talking. That’s what people see, and that’s how they come to look at the election.”

Maybe we’re just in a phase, I suggest. Gorbet demurs. “I think it’s going to get worse,” she says.

Did I stumble upon the only non-hater among the electorate? Let’s hope not, but Gorbet says the “aggressive, win or lose” mentality that American pop culture promotes doesn’t bode well for polite elections.

I end our chat with the obvious question: “Will you be glad when it’s all over?”

“Yeah,” she says. “It might help calm people down.”