“Restoring” our democracy

I was in the car this morning, listening to NPR (I do check in occasionally).  Our local PBS affiliate, KQED, offered a little op-ed piece from a San Francisco woman, who was a polling place coordinator this year.  Unfortunately, despite searching through KQED and NPR, I can’t find a link to the op-ed, so this will be a reconstruction.

The whole thing started off as a nice little piece about the hard, but rewarding work, of making sure people could vote.  It had a little vignette about young musicians working through the challenges of practice and learning, and comparing them to voters who take the time and make the effort to vote, even when the candidates and issues aren’t precisely what they wanted.  My antenna went up, however, when the gal suddenly said something about how great it was that people were getting out there, despite difficulties, to vote for “change,” which I took as a not-so-subtle hint that the gal was an Obama supporter.

I expected the piece to end with some strong political statement about the Democratic party.  It didn’t.  It had something much more subtle.  The gal wrapped up by saying how glad she is that people are taking the vote seriously, so that we can “restore” our democracy.  That came as a surprise to me because I didn’t think we’d stopped being a democracy — but I guess to anyone who thinks the vote was stolen in 2000, democracy as they knew it came to a screeching halt, and that despite the fact that Bush won without issue in 2004.