“In our finest hours ... the soul of the country manifests itself in an inclination to open our arms rather than to clench our fists; to look out rather than to turn inward; to accept rather than to reject.” — Jon Meacham, The Soul of America: The Battle for Our Better Angels
I write this column as the November 2024 presidential election fast approaches and before I know the outcome. I have three predictions. Actually, they are certainties.
First, regardless of the margin of victory, neither candidate will have a mandate. For our country to begin to heal and for our next president to succeed, we can ill afford a sore loser or an arrogant winner.
I know something about close elections. In 1990, I was elected Ohio attorney general in the closest statewide election in Ohio history. My margin is easy to remember: 1-2-3-4.
It was 1,234 votes out of 3.5 million votes cast, less than one vote per precinct, earning me the nickname, “Landslide Lee.” Under Ohio law, there was an automatic recount, and six weeks later, I was declared the winner.
While I was sworn in on Jan. 14, 1991, my opponent filed a lawsuit contesting the election. On March 11, 1991, the Ohio Supreme Court, in an opinion written by Chief Justice Thomas Moyer, ruled unanimously that I could unpack my boxes.
It was a humbling experience. I used to joke that I could walk anywhere in Ohio, talk to any person and know that there was a good chance that person did not vote for me. That election made me appreciate that there is no such thing as a mandate. Whoever wins, regardless of their electoral or popular vote margin, would be well-advised to remember that a very significant number of citizens did not vote for them.
Second, the next president inherits a divided country and a dysfunctional, hyper-partisan Congress.
Today, especially in the U.S. House and Senate, far too many of our elected officials talk past each other, deliberately ignoring points of agreement for fear of losing political advantage and scoring political points with their base supporters rather than trying to find common ground.
It’s too simplistic to label the current division in our country as red vs. blue or liberal vs. conservative. We are divided along demographic and geographic fault lines — race, culture, gender, generation, education, income and rural vs. urban. Too many Americans feel left out of the growing economic prosperity in many of our cities and metro regions. There is a growing disconnect between older, primarily working-class citizens and our increasingly diverse and
globalized country.
Most of us engage in what is called “confirmation bias.” Everything we look for and all that we perceive has a way of proving whatever we believe. That is, we search for and interpret information in a way that confirms our own preconceptions. This tendency to look for people and information that confirms our own views has been accelerated and enhanced by some television opinion channels masquerading as news channels and by internet and social media platforms who use the personal data they collect about us to tailor our online experiences.
Rapidly accelerating technology and globalization, the blurred lines between objective news, biased news, fake news, growing racial and cultural diversity — all these things have the capacity to unite us through hope, dignity, respect and progress or to tear us further apart through anxiety, fear, bigotry and scapegoating.
Third, the president’s single most important responsibility is not rebuilding the economy. It’s rebuilding the human bridges of a divided nation that is coming apart at its seams.
Our next president does not have a mandate to ignore, patronize or stampede the political opposition in order to advance an agenda. The next president must reach out to rivals, critics and skeptics and bring them to their table. Most importantly, our next president must appeal, in President Abraham Lincoln’s words, to “the better angels of our nature.”
Virtually every war, every conflict, every argument, every debate and every divorce comes down to just one thing — not listening. For our country to begin to heal, the president must remind all of us of our common destiny.
Regardless of the outcome, we intend to make the election results a teachable moment at our law school. We seek to be a place where we welcome and celebrate diverse viewpoints but where we share common values.
Our first-year students took a pledge on their first day of law school to adhere to some core values, among them to conduct themselves with dignity and civility; to treat all people with kindness, courtesy and respect; to support freedom of speech and diversity of thought; and to disagree respectfully, peacefully and with an open mind.
Our mandate transcends elections. It is to educate a new generation of leaders who use these core values as their moral compass and who use their special knowledge and skills to make America a place where we strive to find common ground and work for a better common destiny.
Lee Fisher is dean and Joseph C. Hostetler-BakerHostetler chair in law at Cleveland State University College of Law. He is the former Ohio attorney general, lieutenant governor, director of the Ohio Department of Development, chair of the Ohio Third Frontier Commission, chair of the Ohio Organized Crime Commission, president/CEO of the Center for Families and Children, president/CEO of CEOs for Cities, state representative, state senator and chair of the Cuyahoga County state legislative delegation. In 2022, he was inducted in the Cleveland Magazine Business Hall of Fame for his decades of public and nonprofit sector leadership on local, regional and state economic growth and development.
