Inside
NCR
It is late Thursday morning, pushing
noon, and Toni-Ann Ortiz in production is beginning to glare through the glass
that separates our offices. She needs the inside box as we call it
around here. In just a few hours the driver will come to pick up the boards to
take them to the printer, so NCR can roll off the presses and be turned
over to the whims of the Postal Service.
And still we have no president-elect. Pundits say we dont
know when well have a definite answer on the next president. But Toni has
a deadline. So we, like the rest of the country, will just have to move on in
the breach.
What is certain about the next president is that he will be
dealing with a dramatically divided country.
Exit poll data shows that the electorate is deeply polarized.
Im not sure if the American society in general is as deeply divided
as the electorate, said John C. Green, professor of political science and
director of the Ray C. Bliss Institute of Applied Politics at the University of
Akron, Ohio. But in terms of the choice of vision offered by the two
candidates, the country is very sharply divided.
For instance, he said, there was a gender gap -- men voted for
Bush and women voted for Gore. Sixty-one percent of those who never go to
church voted for Gore; 63 percent of those who go to church more than weekly
voted for Bush. Between those extremes -- as people attend church more or less
-- the vote corresponds as you might expect.
White Protestants tended to vote for Bush, while black Protestants
and Jews, as well as non-religious persons tended to vote for Gore.
These are not new divisions, notes Green, but they were more
intense than usual this election.
Roman Catholics, once a pretty solid Democratic vote, were split
between the two major candidates, according to exit polls -- 45 percent for
Gore and 47 percent for Bush.
The conclusion for Green: This year, religious groups and
religious belonging and practice did matter.
As significant, perhaps, as the divisions among the general
populace are the divisions among religious groups. And that is one of the
haunting elements of recent elections. Those who want to have some religious
rationale behind their political involvement find the choices extremely
frustrating. The abortion issue has a lot to do with that frustration: Those
politicians who oppose it so often abandon many of the other mainline religious
concerns, while those who oppose restricting abortion often champion many of
the other issues embraced by those active in traditional social justice
matters.
Whoever moves into the White House will have to deal with those
deep divisions and an almost evenly split electorate. Congress is almost evenly
split, and even the state houses, said Green, show an unusually even split
between Democrats and Republicans.
It seems almost as if there were some country-wide subliminal wish
for a kind of political deadlock, for creating the circumstances where no
single candidate or group can claim much of a mandate or generate much support
for moving very far from the status quo.
Said Green, maybe whoever finally wins this contest will have to
put the laundry list of campaign offerings in his back pocket and pick one or
two big issues -- something like prescription drugs -- and leave ambitious tax
proposals or spending plans for another time. Right now, there appears to be
little mandate to do anything.
-- Tom Roberts
My e-mail address is troberts@natcath.org
National Catholic Reporter, November 17,
2000
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