Jamie Tobias Neely : In modern campaign seasons, politicians rarely hit high notes

I stood in a church pew recently, holding a hymnal and fumbling for the melody.

The usual cues, the strong choir and the talented organist, were missing. The voices surrounding me warbled off in a discordant confusion.

Suddenly, I heard from the pew behind me my pastor’s voice, singing strong and confident, right on key. He had such a firm grasp on the melody that I, too, could grab hold.

Only then could I finally sing that song.

As the last weeks of the election season wind down, it’s as if we’re all standing in a mystified congregation, listening for a voice we can trust. We’re all straining for even the faintest notes of authenticity and truth.

We’re surrounded by harsh tones, deceptive notes, shrill pitches. Blogs and videocasts, television commercials and campaign mailers, radio talk show hosts and letter-to-the-editor writers bombard us with a cacophony of off-key voices.

This year as enemies still wield weapons of terror, we remain desperate to find those candidates whose wisdom and character we can truly trust.

Instead of stirring choirs and beautiful solos, though, we’re mostly subjected to a harsh roar that drowns out all else.

The political parties line up like football players, practicing their game faces and posturing, inciting the crowd into bitterness and frenzy as they turn another campaign season into an exercise in either the maintenance of power or its wrestling away. Americans dutifully line up to cheer the blue team or the red, and lost in the mayhem are any notes of substance, of vision, of truth.

When we peer down into the field to search for a player with character and soul, we can discern brute strength, speed and little else. These players hide in plain sight, disguised behind the padding and the helmets. They’re clothed simply to endure the intense battle of the campaign.

I’m just naïve enough to believe that the framers of the Constitution didn’t have in mind turning the American election season into a giant Super Bowl, all about money and TV time and the grabbing of gold rings.

Instead, they envisioned the people of each state seeking out leaders, the finest men they could find, to represent their own best selves. I’ll bet, too, they imagined communicating with stirring speeches and eloquent writings, not today’s techno-styled din.

To truly work, democracy requires allegiance to basic principles of respect, civility, justice and honesty. Whether you follow one of the various paths of faith or literature or any other valid road of wisdom, you’re likely to find your way to these essential human truths.

But we’re in the season of harsh and fraudulent bellowing.

If there’s a melody to be heard out there, we can’t seem to catch it.

Campaign consultants craft simplistic messages that say nothing: Each candidate vows to trim your taxes, keep your children safe, work hard for you. The words are practically interchangeable from one campaign to the next.

And this is the time of the election season when the notes turn especially sour, when the last-minute TV commercials and mailers stretch out long, gnarled, bony fingers to lure our very worst aspects of our selves.

Just over a week ago, I received one of those dark, shadowy campaign postcards designed to do just that. It accused a candidate for the Washington state senate of “voting to cover up sex crimes against our children.” I felt appalled, incredulous. No matter how appealing his opponent, this message clashed in my ear, a deliberate distortion.

It is so hard to hear the melody through this din. In our time, the wrong notes are so blatantly and gleefully sung. Bombast and deception, malice and dishonesty clash so loudly that we’re all diminished. An election season that should inspire the best in us winds up fortifying our cynicism.

We’re straining to catch a melody here. If our country’s best politicians and their political parties can’t sing in key, how will we Americans ever perform democracy’s song?