How personal has this election gotten?
Put it this way: It followed Ted G. Jelen into his doctor's office in Nevada last week.
It went to work with Lisa Kellogg, a San Gabriel Valley preschool teacher who found herself arguing with a parent in the thick of morning drop-off.
It tracked Karen Dalrymple, a Michigan software developer, into the garage where the mechanic servicing her red Ford Focus should have kept his opinions to himself.
In the Del Webb retirement community of Lincoln, near Sacramento, it prompted a man to storm out of the billiards room this month and down a hall where the Democratic Club had spilled out of its meeting quarters. ("He was just waving his pool stick and shouting, 'I don't have to listen to this crap! Take it inside!' " said Nancy Krause, a 67-year-old retired administrative assistant who was there.)
At the West Angeles Church of God in Christ in Los Angeles, it trailed 75 congregants into the Tuesday night Bible study. "One of the young ladies communicated she was a supporter of [President] Bush, and people started, well, not to boo exactly but you could hear grumbling and rumbling," said Elder Ben Stephens, the church's college and young adult pastor. The mood was sufficiently ticklish that he ended the session with 2 Chronicles, 7:14:
"If my people, which are called by my name, shall humble themselves, and pray, and seek my face, and turn from their wicked ways; then will I hear from heaven, and will forgive their sin, and will heal their land."
As the clock winds down on the most polarized presidential race in a generation, the mood of the electorate is almost unbearably emotional -- and there's nowhere to hide. Partisan politics, something normal people avoid in workaday human relations, appear to have gone to a place few have seen since the Vietnam War era, to the point that many confess they just want this election to be over.
The spinning and selling, they say, the doublespeak and dissembling, have managed not just to sway and confuse as political operatives intended, but to set neighbor on neighbor. ("Red states, blue states -- we're a nation of gang colors," one political scientist observed sadly last week.)
Anxiety, depression, anger -- demoralizing feelings that modern Americans have rarely, if ever, associated with choosing a leader -- have been reported even from friendly precincts, and yard-sign fights and bumper sticker defacements are just the beginning. Last week in Florida, a Democrat was arrested for allegedly attempting to drive his Cadillac into U.S. Rep. Katherine Harris, the Republican in charge of the state's 2000 recount, and a Bush-backing Marine recruit was charged with trying to stab his girlfriend in the neck with a screwdriver after she threatened to leave him and vote for John Kerry.
Creeping into daily life
Even more revealing are the unsensational tales that have emanated for months now from families, schoolyards, synagogues, book clubs and just about every other venue in which one decided voter runs up against another.
In Arlington, Va., a Republican woman who didn't want her name used said her neighbor, a Democrat, needled her so incessantly about her pet, a French poodle, that the two have stopped speaking. In San Diego, a soft-spoken surfer -- who likewise wanted to remain anonymous -- got into a shouting match over the election with his mom at his 7-year-old son's birthday party.
Others tell of pointed remarks in line at the drug store, of businesses they can't bear to frequent, of children who come home crying that the other kids said their candidate was "evil." The political has become personal this time, voters say, and the emotional toll -- and by this point emotional exhaustion -- has been preternaturally high.
Beverly Hills psychologist Karen Bierman says so many of her clients have brought the election up in therapy that she's beginning to think of it as a mental health issue.
"I've been in practice for 22 years and have never had so many people coming in feeling so personally upset and offended and manipulated and angry," she said. "They feel that there's a kind of bullying going on that's, well, offensive, and to be offended is a very bad feeling, you can't let go of it. Usually when people are upset, it's about things in their own personal lives."
Kate Schmidt, a personal trainer in Eagle Rock, said she knows those feelings.
"I'm in a 12-step program and have been meeting with this group of women for six years, and I thought we knew each other," said Schmidt. When she learned secondhand that one of the members was voting for Bush, she was stunned at the vehemence of her reaction.
"I'm 50 years old and I've never felt this way about a presidential election," she said. "There's not one single thing about Bush that's good in my opinion, and for people not to see that is confusing to me."
