An election to remember

After four short years of journalism school, I still believe thebest part of the newspaper is the comics. I saw this quotation fromWinston Churchill in 1944 reprinted in The Dallas MorningNews in the comic “Heart of the City: At the bottom ofall the tributes paid to democracy is the little man, walking intothe little booth, with a little pencil, making a little cross on alittle bit of paper — no amount of rhetoric or voluminousdiscussion can possibly diminish the overwhelming importance of thepoint.”

Voting. I’ve spent two columns talking about how importantit is this semester. Last week’s piece was one of them.

I’m not supposed to respond to a response, but I’mcompelled by outside parties to make a reference to a certaincommentary by Chris Purcell, a first-year student.

If one were to take the time to re-read my previous work, thenit’s clear that not once did I make a comment that attackedor favored one political party.

If anything, I attacked the very industry I represent for theVietnam/Iraq reference.

In 2003, Rex Randall Erickson wrote a column for The SanDiego Union-Tribune in which he says, “The concept is thesame; training and supporting a largely suspect force ofVietnamese/Iraqis to do the policing to lessen U.S. casualties(remember how well that worked in Vietnam?).”

The headline for Bartholomew Sullivan’s column in the May30, 2004 Sunday edition of The Commercial Appeal read,”The Road from Tet To Fallujah — Vietnam, Iraq: HowAlike Are They?”

William Pfaff wrote in January 2004 for the InternationalHerald Tribune, “The relevant analogy of Vietnam withIraq is political.”

Shall I go on?

It’s comments like these that I found bothersome.

Never once did I say Purcell compared Iraq to Vietnam. But evenstill, why make the reference during the debate if the comparisonwas not the intention? America has been through many other wars andpresidents that we can use to compare numbers.

Speaking of Lyndon Johnson’s administration, it’strue that the country saw economic growth during the years of the”Great Society.”

But when the U.S. decided to commit troops in 1961, and Kennedywas assassinated in 1963, Johnson had to take up a war on twofronts: Vietnam and domestic poverty that the Great Society soughtto eradicate.

Of course, this was a virtual impossibility to accomplishwithout raising taxes.

So, Johnson’s administration had employed many newdomestic programs that helped Americans and managed to balance thebudget by 1969. He chose not to run for re-election, leaving Nixonwith a legacy of debt and inflation that forced many ofJohnson’s Great Society programs to shut down.

The rest is history.

But who cares about what happened in the 1960s when we just hadan election in 2004?

I used to be able to talk about our electoral process with prideto my friends from other countries. Some of them are waiting ontheir citizenships and are disheartened that they weren’table to participate in these elections.

But when I look back at the past year of politics, I’m alittle ashamed. All the name-calling, mud-slinging andfinger-pointing from all sides is difficult to explain to someonetrying to learn our culture of “civil discourse.”

Other countries must be laughing at us right now because of therift we’ve placed between ourselves and our fellow Americans.Maybe now that voting is over, we all can go back to being civilagain.

Christine Dao is a senior journalism major. She may becontacted at [email protected].