I do not miss election time in the United States. Perhaps there was a time in my life where I once relished it. It is easy to get got caught up in the constant horserace of 21st century electoral politics of my homeland because it is in the ether all around us: on the radio, on TV, on the Internet. The very nature of the bloated 24-hour cable news cycle, the persistent hum of a web media desperate for every click, and a dying newspaper industry with vanishing cachet lends itself to the circus sideshow of our modern political spectacle. Pundits galore ask the truly tough questions: Who is ahead? Who is behind? Who is leading in the polls? Who said something stupid, offensive, or as is often the case, both, in an interview? The all-important question has been the same since the dark coming of this strange political climate: What does this (“this” could be anything) mean for the next election? America has been in the state of Perpetual Campaign for many years now, where our representatives famously spend more time on the phone attempting to raise money than they do governing the country. Re-election campaigns used to begin a few months before November; now they seem to begin the day after the election and continue on for the duration of an elected official’s time in office.
I do not miss election time in the United States, but I certainly get enough of it anyway, even as far away from it in the physical sense. It’s in the ether. Politics has a tendency to seep into everything. On some level, it has always been thus.
I remember voting in my first presidential election at the young age of 18 (to say which would date me, so I will not admit which election it was) for a man I did not care for in order to attempt to prevent the election of a man I really did not care for. Such has been my attitude toward voting in America ever since, with only a few exceptions. I cannot help but imagine that in the increasingly polarized American electorate there are many more people like myself holding their noses in the voting booth.
Over my lifetime several aspects of American political life have changed. The judiciary alone is worth noting because its changes have had profound effects on the rest of the country. The Supreme Court, the highest judicial body in the US, selected a president after the Florida debacle of 2000. That same court (though with a slightly different make up) years later deliberated and decided that money and free speech were synonymous in politics, opening the door to what amounts to a complete and totally unregulated influx of money into elections already previously awash with money. This case, called Citizens United, was bound to have an impact on the 2014-midterm elections (between presidential races every four years) in the American congress. I was unfortunate
enough to see some of it firsthand.
I was briefly visiting the United States at the beginning of November, having completely forgotten about the coming election on the 4th of the month. My time was mostly spent with family, but the television set was occasionally on and it was there I got a two-day bombardment of political advertisements concerning the local state elections.
The advertisements were near constant; whatever program was on felt like merely the space between the next TV spot. Most were what are called “attack ads”- negative advertisements not in support of a candidate, but in opposition to one. With the vast increase of “dark money”-untraceable campaign election funds funneled through arcane networks of political action committeesthese ads are on the rise. According to the new rules, unlimited secret money can be used to fund advertising in elections as long as they do not advocate for a particular candidate. Thus many of the ads I saw, paid for by groups with unfailingly Orwellian sounding names (“America’s Liberty PAC,” “America Votes Action Fund,” “Faith Family Freedom Fund”) were always meant to defame one candidate, but somehow never to actually support the other. America famously has a two party system wherein third party or minority candidates almost never win big elections. In most races, it is a Democrat versus a Republican. Many of the ads were laughably unsubtle: scary images flashing on the screen, chilling words said about one candidate or the other, comparisons with unpopular leaders. Combined with the total canvassing of the area with election posters and yard signs, and it was all a bit much.
All these ads cost a lot of money: $111,000,000 was raised on both sides of the North Carolina Senate Race between Kay Hagan and Thom Tillis alone, according to the Brookings Institute : the most expensive Senate election in US history (not adjusted for inflation, just in sheer dollar amount). That is ￦123,921,079,774 on a single race, and not even a presidential one. It is an obscene amount of money, and plenty of it went to the large media companies that own the TV stations that sell ad time. I was grateful when Election Day came and went, though the campaign signs remained up all around the area for the rest of the week.
My knowledge of Korean politics is slim at best. I often tell the story of my first run in with Korean politics: crossing the street in the City Hall section of Daejeon while one group of pink-outfit wearing middle aged women in visors did a synchronized dance to campaign music being blasted from a trailer directly across the street from a different group of yellow-outfit wearing middle aged women in visors doing a slightly different synchronized dance to different campaign music being blasted from another trailer and getting a cacophonous effect in my ears. I doubt this is emblematic of the process
at large: the Korean public clearly takes their elections and indeed democracy itself very seriously and that is always to be admired. As is often pointed out about the US, voting turnout is often low and this is sad for a number of reasons. While I don’t always understand the campaign signs here in Korea, their omnipresence during election season does not irritate me as much as it does back in the
US. For one thing, it definitely feels shorter and for that I am grateful.
By Prof. Matthew Ross | Department of English and Literature