Hamlet on the Potomac, and other players

Randi Kreiss

The morning after was just as disturbing as the weeks leading up to the Nov. 2 midterm election. The losers lacked grace and graciousness; the winners lacked humility. The only thing confirmed for me as a citizen is that elections mirror the culture of the times, and we are in a time of chip-on-the-shoulder, I’m-right-you’re-wrong, pervasive discontent.

As a supporter of President Obama and his policies, I was prepared for an electoral drubbing, but nothing left me as depressed as the president’s press conference the day after the election. If you listened to it, it was fine. He struck the right tone of humility; he said he could have done things better; he took responsibility for the Democrats’ defeats; he promised to forge ahead to do the people’s work.

But the event was much like the Nixon-Kennedy debate in 1960. If you listened to it, Nixon won; his ideas were sound and his debating style was skilled. However, if you saw the debate on TV, you thought Nixon lost. Sweat was beading on his upper lip and his forehead; he looked like the crook he eventually became.

So, too, Obama did better on the audio than the visual. As New York Times columnist Gail Collins wrote, he looked as if he had spent the night bailing water out of the White House basement. Down in the face, sad in the eyes, he looked absolutely miserable. I’m sure he was, but he needed to fake it for the cameras. For his opponents, he needed to look resolute and strong; for his supporters, he needed to look unbowed, even if bloodied by the battle. The dreadful photos of him that were splashed on the front pages of almost every daily newspaper in the country will haunt him in his run for re-election.

Then there was John Boehner. I caught his post-election breakdown as well, in which he basically sobbed his way through a sloppy, self-indulgent, Dickensian history of his early years mopping floors in his father’s bar. Boo-hoo, was he ever feeling sorry for himself and amazed at how far he has come and wanting us to be amazed, too. When he pulled himself together, he indicated that he was the man of the House now, and we shouldn’t expect much in the way of conciliation.

The president and the presumptive speaker were just two of the post-election acts. Carl Paladino, the madman on the Hudson, brandished a baseball bat at his concession speech, reinforcing his unfortunate image as an intemperate thug.

In California, Carly Fiorina refused to concede the race for a Senate seat even after the apparent truth had set her free — to find another job.

Of course, my favorite post-election performance was by Christine O’Donnell, who ran for the Senate in Delaware. I thought it would be hard to top her “I’m not a witch” campaign ad, but she outdid herself on Election Night. Without a bit of lessons-learned wisdom, she advised her opponent, Sen.-elect Chris Coons, to watch her 30-minute campaign video so that he might educate himself on her vision of leadership. I get it; she lost but it’s still all about her.

Rand Paul, who won a Senate seat in Kentucky as a Tea Party candidate, delivered a laundry list of clichéd campaign talking points that included, “We stand on a precipice,” “This is a day of reckoning,” “Washington is broken” and the ever-popular promise “We’ve come to take our country back.” He offered virtually no specifics on how he would get from here to there.

History offers us many examples of individuals who have risen above the election fray to deliver courageous and gracious concession speeches. None stands out more than Al Gore’s speech in 2000. After an election that was arguably stolen out from under him, he took the high road, with humor and intelligence and good will.

In the same spirit, a defeated Adlai Stevenson said in 1952, “I urge you all to give General Eisenhower the support he will need to carry out the great tasks that lie before him. I pledge him mine. We vote as many, but we pray as one.”

After she lost the Democratic primary to Obama, after a singularly contentious fight and an unexpected defeat, Hilary Clinton spoke of his “determination, grace and grit.” She said, “I stand here with Barack Obama to say, ‘Yes we can.’”

Finally, in 2008, after one of the nastiest presidential campaigns in history, John McCain delivered a beautiful and elegant concession speech, praising Obama, acknowledging the significance in American history of electing an African-American president and pledging his support. In many ways, that speech was McCain’s finest hour.

We have, in our history, been privileged to see and hear uplifting, gracious acceptance and concession speeches. Sadly, this year, we witnessed a tortured Hamlet offering mea culpas from the White House and various chest-thumping winners exhibiting hubris rather than grace.

Copyright © 2010 Randi Kreiss. Randi can be reached at randik3@aol.com or (516) 569-4000 ext. 304.