Attraction to politics found in the memory of Election Days past - Placebo Effect

I'm writing this on Election Day, a day which is near and dear to my heart. This pro-electoral feeling is not entirely political: I used to follow politics pretty closely, but my interest in it was always mostly character-driven, which can be hard to maintain in a different milieu. Allow me to elaborate: Manchester, NH is a pretty small place, and we know our public officials fairly well. I even remember a few times where we drove by the mayor's house (he lived down the block from a friend of mine) just to feel that in some small high school way, we were being threatening (he wasn't very popular among the newspaper crowd I ran with). The long and the short of it is that Manchester is a bit like 5th-century (BCE) Athens, in that our version of democracy, while not quite a direct as Solon's, is very participatory and very personal, leading to a real sense of involvement and empowerment with very little effort on the part of the citizen. So the upshot of all this is that I'm not nearly so interested in politics now that I don't live in Manchester any more. Sure, I can still read The Union Leaderon-line, but all that right-wing invective and aldermanic infighting just doesn't come across with as much warmth on a computer screen.

Of course, this may seem a little strange when one considers it in light of the fact that I've never actually voted in Manchester. Yes, that's right: I achieved that level of political satisfaction and feeling of enfranchisement without once setting foot in a voting booth. I registered to vote in Maryland my freshman year, mainly as a matter of convenience, and voted for Martin O'Malley in my first election that November. Nonetheless, I've never really felt quite a part of the Baltimore political milieu, perhaps because reading the Sun is so hard to make oneself do.

So, to return to my point: my attraction to Election Day is not mainly political. Nor does it rest entirely on the great episode of Northern Exposure in which they elect a new mayor (although that is one of my all-time favorites). I think it relates more to the fact that for my entire elementary school career, I had gym class and ate lunch in that great shrine of democracy: the polling place. Once a year, the voting machines would be rolled into the gymnasium/cafeteria, to stand in rows against the walls, waiting to be used to register the people's will. By the simple act of rolling those blue-curtained machines (I seem to remember that the curtains on the booths were blue) into the room, Webster School became more than an institution for instructing children in the three Rs (and the liberal use of paste), it became an instrument for transmitting power, for building government from the raw material of the popular will. In short, it became the foundation of the society we children were being prepared to belong to, and we received an object lesson every November in the obligations we were someday to undertake.

Probably the other source for my fond memories of Election Day come not from the day itself, but from those blissful February days before and during the New Hampshire primary. For the politically uninformed reader, New Hampshire, by state law, mandates that it have the first primary in the nation, and it traditionally has been an accurate predictor of who will ultimately win their party's nomination. So, in consequence, the various candidates make the whole state, and especially Manchester, a prominent campaign stop.

I remember the scads of campaign signs outside the school playground, and the candidates and their staffs clustered around the lines of people waiting to vote, shaking hands and kissing babies. Some friends, expressing their Democratic sensibilities at a young age, once started shouting "Bush is a tush" at some Bush (the elder) staffers working the crowd, and another time I shared a friend's elation at his getting Paul Tsongas' autograph (his parents weren't voting for him, but he was still excited). It was a thrilling experience, even for such tender youths as us, and we appreciated it in a way in which I'm not sure that elementary schoolers elsewhere would have. After all, most of our country's political leaders aren't really all that exciting. perhaps we were just more politically aware than our agemates in less electorally-privileged areas. It was good fun, though, and maybe something I miss a bit: after all, even with a few thousand potential voters at Homewood, when was the last time a political candidate blew through here? And no, Ralph Nader doesn't count. We're talking major parties here. Basically, it's been a while, and I'll bet some of you New Jerseyites have never had a Presidential contender interrupt your kickball game. Just one more thing you all missed not growing up in New Hampshire.