First Parish Unitarian Universalist"Gloom Like the Noonday"
Sermon by the Rev. Diane Teichert
First Parish Unitarian Universalist - Canton MA
October 22, 2000
Reading: Amos 8
(Facetiously)
"It's making me feel all so self-important, being one of those undecided voters who the Democrats and Republicans are wooing these days. Last time around I was a "soccer mom" but this time I'm the undecided middle class working mom. I just love being the center of attention. The pundits keep talking about me—incessantly, wondering what I am feeling and thinking. Every time I pick up the phone, I just know I'll be asked to participate in a survey and when I am asked if I've decided yet, I'll say that 'well, why certainly not! I won't make up my mind until after I pull the lever and the curtain closes behind me and the polling place lady comes over to see if I'm okay since I've been in the little booth so long. No, sir, you just keep calling me, right up to election day itself. I'm sure I won't get to the polls 'til right before they close. I'll be the last of the undecided working moms, and proud of it! I just can't decide–will it be Bore or Gush? Oh, my dear, did I say that? I mean Gore or Bush, of course."
It's easy to parody this presidential election.
There's only been one high point in the campaign for me, and that was when Al Gore announced Joe Lieberman as his running mate. Religious liberals of every political persuasion likely saw that choice as a welcome testimony to American tolerance, a bit of hope in what is otherwise, for me, a rather gloomy presidential campaign season.
But, did you see the Wasserman cartoon that appeared shortly thereafter? It showed a man speaking at a bunting-draped podium with a woman (dressed in a pert suit) clapping at his side. He's gesturing toward another gentleman, who is waving, presumably to a crowd. He also has a woman at his side, similarly dressed, similarly clapping. Balloons are scattered around the stage in front of the four of them who are, by the way, all white. The words along the top of the cartoon frame read, "How to tell when we reach true religious tolerance" while the man at the podium is exclaiming, "Let me introduce my running mate–an atheist!"
More on the subject of this sermon, however, was another Wasserman cartoon that ran in the Globe the day after the debate at U-Mass Boston. It shows two heavily padded, helmeted, face masked policemen blocking a doorway over which a sign says Debate. A man with a clipboard is saying to a forlorn looking Ralph Nader, "We see your ticket, but we can't find a listing of your corporate sponsor."
As you probably heard, Ralph Nader, who is the presidential candidate for the Green Party, acquired a ticket to watch the debate, but was not allowed into the debate hall. John Bezeris, a representative of the Presidential Debate Commission, and three State Troopers denied him entrance. As reported in the Globe the next day, Mr. Bezeris said, "It's already been decided that whether or not you have a ticket you are not welcome in the debate." ( Boston Globe, 10/4, p. A26).
Subsequent to that exchange Nader was invited by a Fox News official to watch the debate in the Fox News trailer and provide commentary. Again Mr. Bezeris and the three State Troopers denied him entrance. This was reported on WBUR-Radio the next morning.
So, first a legitimate candidate is denied the opportunity to participate in the debate. Then he's denied a seat to watch it. Then he is denied access to the media and vice versa, and, finally, the voters are deprived of the benefit of his commentary on the issues. Is this a free election? What about freedom of the press? Is this a democracy???
The cartoon is telling…"we can't find a listing of your corporate sponsor." I visited the website of the Commission on Presidential Debates to see on what grounds third party candidates were excluded from the presidential debates. When the home page appeared, my eye naturally traveled down to a bit of color at the bottom of the page: the logos of the "sponsors" of the website: Oracle, AT&T, 3Com and other hi-tech firms.
It would appear that a key part of the public election process, the presidential debates, is paid for by private corporations not only through the purchasing of television advertising time but through their sponsorship of the supposedly non-profit organization that determines the rules governing the debates, the Commissions on Presidential Debates.
This is not a fair and free election, in my view. This is a bought election, on the order of the fraudulent business Amos decried in the passage I read earlier, the punishment for which was "I will make the sun go down at noon and darken the earth in broad daylight. I will turn your feast into mourning and all your songs into lamentation…"
According to its website, the Commission on Presidential Debates set the bar for inclusion in the presidential debates at 15%, meaning that a third party candidate would have to be getting 15% of the voters support, as determined by the average of five different polls taken prior to the first debate. It's no wonder they set it so high–I understand that Jesse Ventura only had 8% of the vote in Minnesota before the televised debates in which he was allowed to participate…and look who won the election!
I believe 15% is an all but impossible target for a third party candidate, given the millions of campaign dollars spent by the Republican and Democratic Parties. Of course it would be in the interest of the corporate sponsors to restrict debate participation to the candidates they support.
But, there is no doubt in my mind that if the viable third party candidates had been allowed to participate in the presidential debates this year, the debates would have been far more instructive, far more focused on real differences and far less focused on gaffes and sighs and who was nicer to whom. The voters deserve better. We deserve better debates. We deserve better candidates.
It's time to take back the election process. It's time to set real campaign spending limits. It's time to prevent the media from raising their advertising rates during presidential election seasons, driving up their profits as well as campaign spending totals. It's time to restrict corporate funding and increase public funding of elections. And, it's time to give the presidential debates back to the non-partisan League of Women Voters so that we can get a real debate going about the future of our country.
These steps would begin to address my gloom concerning the state of our democracy. The issues are complex, but they demand our attention as Unitarian Universalists whose congregations have covenanted "to affirm and promote the right of conscience and the use of the democratic process within our congregations and in society at large," as we say in our Principles and Purposes.
We call this is a democracy, but too few of the citizens are participating for it to be called a true or even vibrant democracy. Did you know that in the 1996 presidential election, less than 49 percent of voters participated, the lowest level since 1924? More than three-quarters of the eligible voters did not support President Clinton's re-election bid, either because they did not vote for him or did not vote at all. That means he had less than one-quarter of the eligible voters' support. That's no popular mandate!
I learned this in an article by Lani Guinier, Harvard Law School Professor. She went on to say that fewer and fewer voters from low-income families are participating in this "partial democracy," as she calls it. (Reflecting All of Us: the Case for Proportional Representation, pp. ix-xvii.)
So, who is voting? "According to Census Bureau figures, turnout in 1998 hardly varied between men and women…or between blacks and whites. In contrast, the gap between generations is huge… The generation 65 years of age and over votes at nearly four times the rate of their grandchildren ages 18 to 24…but thirty years ago, the same ration was only 2 to 1." ("The country's greatest challenge: enticing the young to the voting booth," by Robert D. Putnam and David E. Campbell, Boston Globe).
As Robert D. Putnam and David E. Campbell wrote in a recent Boston Globe op ed piece, "similar declines have been documented for many other types of political activity, in particular those activities that require people to work together with other people. Consistently, the decline is greatest among the youngest. For example, from 1973 to 1994, the percentage of Americans age 18-29 who worked for a political party plummeted 64 percent, compared with a drop-off of [only] 21 percent for people 60 and over.
But while most forms of political participation are down, political contributions are up. Even after accounting for inflation, spending on presidential campaigns increased five-fold from 1964 to 1996. The result is a political system where more and more money is spent to attract fewer and fewer voters to the polls.
The parties have come to rely on financial capital in place of social capital–face-to-face campaigning. As a result, politics is increasingly something we watch, not something we do. But genuine democracy," they conclude, "cannot be a spectator sport."
With political campaigns being increasingly dependent on large sums of money, only those people capable of raising large sums–from wealthy individuals and large corporations–can become candidates. Thus, these funding sources vote long before we, the voters, step into the voting booth to choose between the candidates they have chosen. With this in mind, it is difficult for any candidate, once elected, to "cross" the sources of that campaign support. Therefore, issues involving the interests of those funders, such as the high prices and high profits of U.S. pharmaceuticals, are not likely to be addressed.
Even Business Week, hardly a communist publication, published in its September 11th edition an editorial demanding that corporations "get out of politics."
Large sums of money play a role in referendum politics as well as election politics. Question 5 on the ballot here in Massachusetts is a case in point. Hotly contested, this referendum addresses health care issues such as increasing access and decreasing HMO expenditures for marketing, advertising and lobbying. If you don't know much about it, there is a flyer from the Massachusetts Council on Churches about it on the committee information table in the Parish Hall.
I bring it up here just to say that the Vote No on 5 campaign has reportedly spent four million dollars whereas the Vote Yes on 5 campaign, which obtained 110,000 signatures to get the measure on the ballot, has only been able to afford radio ads. Whose point of view will be better known by election day, do you suppose?
A prophetic voice cries out, your democracy is on the demise!
How can you say it is government of the people, by the people, for the people…if the people don't participate at the most basic level, by voting?
It's not government by the people, it's government by the money. Money to choose the candidates, money to pay for the advertising, money to sponsor the Commission on Presidential Debates website, money to sponsor the debates, money to fight referendums, money to fund this spectator sport called the American Democracy. Unlimited corporate contributions of soft money to public campaigns are corrupting your political process.
Let the gloom be lifted by our resolve. Not over night, but by small measures.
It's time to take back the democratic election process.
It's time for the third party candidates to each get 5% of the vote, enough to qualify for federal election campaign money next time around.
It's time to set real campaign spending limits. It's time to prohibit the media from raising their advertising rates during presidential election seasons, driving up their profits as well as campaign spending totals. It's time to restrict corporate funding and increase public funding of elections.
It's time for the debates to be publicly funded and publicly controlled, with a lower threshold for participation by third party candidates, sponsored by a non-partisan organization such as the League of Women Voters.
And, it's time to for us, the eligible voters, to engage in a real debate about the future of our country. We will no longer allow ourselves to be relegated to the sidelines of the democratic process as if it is–or can survive as– a spectator sport.
It's time to affirm and promote the use of the democratic process… in society at large…as a means to do the work of peace and justice at home and around the world.
Amen.