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Jewish World Review August 28, 2000 / 27 Menachem-Av, 5760

Bob Greene

Bob Greene
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Consumer Reports


Who will make your life better by August of 2004?


http://www.jewishworldreview.com -- THERE IS A SWEET SUSPENSION of disbelief -- an uncharacteristic public innocence -- that visits our country every four years. Now is the time for that visit, and it is one that is seldom commented upon.

It has to do with the oft-stated national conviction that the election of one person for president will change hundreds of millions of individual lives. That is the underlying current behind every presidential campaign -- that the identity of the victor will have an effect that is quite personal to each American. That a life -- your life -- will be changed, depending on which candidate wins.

That is why, almost every presidential year, one party raises the question: "Ask yourself: Are you better off than you were four years ago?" The party asking the question is always the one with a vested interest in the assumed answer -- it's one of those questions you don't ask without knowing what the response is going to be.

But the conceit behind it -- and here is where the sweet suspension of disbelief comes in -- is that your life -- you, you as an island, you as one face in the mirror. ...

The presumption is that your life is profoundly affected by the identity of the person in the White House. That your life is made better or is made worse, depending on who wins.

It's seldom so. Make a list of the people who affect your life.

There's your family. Your friends. Your boss. Your co-workers. The lady at the lunch counter who makes your sandwich, and puts an extra slice of tomato on it because she knows you like it. The bus driver who always arrives on time, even in the rain, and the neighbor who plays his music maddeningly loud after midnight, and the ambitious fellow at the office who wants a promotion and plans to get it by climbing over you, and the person on the street who makes your day brighter with an unexpected smile, and the other person around the next corner who makes your day more unpleasant with his incessant foul-mouthed barks into his cell phone. ...

No attempt to be facetious here. This is simply pointing out that which is quite evident:

There are a lot of people in the world who affect your life in ways that you can feel. The president is usually not one of them.

There are big exceptions. Warfare. Economic depression.

But even those are often not affected as directly by a president as the history books assume. Most wars are started by other people -- and while a president's decisions in waging war are of such importance that mere words do not give justice to the gravity of the task, the soldiers who come through warfare seldom, in the years that follow, speak about the commander in chief. Their lives were touched by the people around them -- the people they could see.

The same with economic troubles. What happens to the economy during a president's watch has an undeniable effect on the citizens of the country -- but when things get very bad, the president and his advisers can seem as powerless as the rest of us. We sense that forces far from Pennsylvania Avenue in our nation's capital are in control -- and that it is up to us to hold on, to do our best, until the inevitable swing back occurs. Franklin Delano Roosevelt notwithstanding, most presidents seem more a captive of the economy than its master.

So, four years from now, will your life be different, depending on whether Al Gore or George W. Bush is elected president?

You can probably find the answer to that by asking yourself the same question retroactively -- by asking yourself if your life is better or worse today than it was four years ago, in August of 1996, because of the fact that Bill Clinton went on to defeat Bob Dole that fall.

Your life may be better; your life may be worse. Your life may be just about the same.

But it's a pretty good bet that -- unless you work on the White House staff, or for a branch of the government that is altered by which party is in power -- the people and things that helped or hindered your life in the last four years have little to do with who won the election in November of '96 -- and that, by this time in the year 2004, the good and bad things that have happened to your life will have little relation to the results of the contest between Gore and Bush.

The sweetness of all this is that we choose to try to believe otherwise. Always have; always will. It's one of our more attractive qualities.



JWR contributor Bob Greene is a novelist and columnist. Send your comments to him by clicking here.

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