A self-worshiping deity

This has been a maddeningly long campaign.  My five days on the hustings in Virginia haven’t made it feel any shorter.  I won’t have much satisfaction until the end of today, if Barack Obama is reelected.

It is going to be a miracle if he is reelected, whatever the margin.  The amounts of money and venom poured out against him are truly astounding.  The Thomas Peterffy ad, which I saw for the first time at dawn yesterday on CNN, was the last straw for me.  The notion that the United States today in any way resembles, or is headed towards, the Iron Curtain nightmare referred to in the ad is outrageous.  Peterffy seems to me a self-appointed, self-worshiping deity.  That is not a compliment.

I spent yesterday trudging through Franklin, Virginia, in neighborhoods that were an odd combination of beautiful older houses–some restored, some not–and a hideous public housing project.  Get out the vote was again the name of the game.  I caught a whiff of my own “living demography” when some kids on the playground in the project expressed surprise that I was voting for President Obama.  One resident even wondered out loud whether it was because he would protect my Social Security check.

I’m not really worried about my Social Security check if Mitt Romney is elected.  But I am worried about a nation that would choose his priorities (a further defense buildup) over Obama’s (a strong defense with much, much smaller investments in education and infrastructure).  I’m also worried about the truly single-minded effort to protect high-income earners and hereditary wealth.  Not to mention women’s rights.  These are values questions for me.

Most of the people I saw today don’t seem to worry about much of that.  Nor do they seem hostile to entrepreneurial success, which is Peterffy’s charge against the president.  They just want a president whose black skin will make him more sympathetic, they hope, to their plight and open up opportunities that are open to others.  Their lives haven’t been transformed in his first four years.  They don’t seem to expect much more from the next four.  Just a bit of reflected dignity from a president who looks like them.

I suppose there is a kind of symmetry in that:  Peterffy looks to a Romney victory for something similar.  The difference is that Peterffy has got lots and wants more.  His inability to empathize with people who start out even more disadvantaged than he did is astounding.  It is beyond me why he would choose to support Mitt Romney, who is certainly not a self-made man, rather than Barack Obama, who is.  What kind of person works his way up from the bottom and then looks down sneeringly and says you can make it if only you try?  What would make Peterffy identify with inherited wealth and privilege?  To attribute all of one’s success in life to talent and none of it to luck or help from others, or the color of your skin, is amazingly narcissistic.

I’ve lived most of my life among the privileged.  But I have not forgotten either where I came from or the enormous assistance and good fortune I’ve had along the way, including the Social Security benefits on which I went to college (as did Paul Ryan).  And I don’t want to live the rest of it in a society dominated with the values of Mr. Peterffy, who romanticizes his climb to wealth as an individual struggle against great odds that testifies only to his own virtue.

I’ve already voted.  I’m headed out now to help others get to the polls.