“If you could send one message with your vote this year so the people who win the election know what you mean with your vote,” the question goes, “what would that message be?”
Think that one over for a moment. Here’s what we have and have had cooking on the domestic front: Obamacare, immigration reform, a shrinking workforce, student loans, minimum wage, Ferguson, IRS, NSA, VA, “Scandal.” Across our shores: ISIS/Syria/Iraq, Russia/Ukraine, Israel/Hamas, Iran’s nuke program, Libya. The themes relevant to many of these: a fractured and unpopular Congress, an adrift and unpopular White House, lack of government accountability and transparency, lack of moral leadership on the world stage, public distrust of institutions. Problems: we are in possession of them.
So again, if you could send one message with your vote this year so the people you send to Congress know what’s guiding your vote, what would that message be? The people told Gallup.
Some of these wishes overlap: it would seem that “being honest” and “listening to constituents” are much of “the job you were elected to do.” Some are absurdly general and not instructive: “bipartisanship,” “be productive” and “focus on domestic issues” are three of the top four messages voters want to send to their elected officials this year. Something tells me sports teams don’t fare well when the coach’s instructions to the players are to “be good sports,” “work hard” and “focus on that one half of the playbook.”
Overall, the messages are representative of one request: “Fix everything.” The current composition of Washington enables it only to fix little.
Eight years ago, although some news headlines and some priorities were different, voters still couldn’t get together on what they wanted to see of their congresspersons:
As long as the nation’s capital is incapable of resolving the ever-aggregating pile of problems facing it and the public, the complaints and the requests of the people will be too numerous from which choose.
