Election angers some, pleases others
Many area voters went to bed Tuesday night without having a clear-cut winner in the race between President George W. Bush and U.S. Sen. John Kerry and with the prospect of a repeat of the 2000 presidential election fiasco. They woke Wednesday still not knowing a winner – until Kerry conceded the controversial race in Ohio and the presidency to Bush in the afternoon.
For several Fayette County residents interviewed Wednesday, the senator abandoned his pursuit of the White House too early, while others said voters across the country did right in re-electing Bush to a second term.
Kerry won Fayette County, capturing 53 percent of the vote to Bush’s 46 percent.
Standing outside the Uniontown Mall, Jennifer Pepper, 32, of Farragut Street in Uniontown blasted the nation’s electorate for giving Bush another four years in office.
Pepper said the newly re-elected president won’t pull troops out of the war in Iraq, like she said Kerry would, and he won’t help Americans find the jobs many need.
“It’ll be three times as worse,” Pepper said about the next four years. “…I heard that you never should pull a president out of a war, but he’s not going to get us out.”
Pepper’s shopping partner, 61-year-old Jean Jones, also a resident of Farragut Street, was strong in her stance and highly upset about the results of the election.
Fists flailing in anger, she said, “I don’t like it (the election). …I don’t like Bush. …He’s not going to end the war. He’s not for the poor or the seniors. There are no jobs, no medicine. What are senior citizens getting out of this? He just wants to fill up his pockets. It’s pitiful. This country is going downhill.”
Jones said she hasn’t seen a closer election since John F. Kennedy defeated Richard Nixon for the presidency.
Pepper and Jones agreed if Kerry would have waited until the Ohio state votes were counted, the Massachusetts senator could have become America’s next president.
“If he would have waited 10 days, he would have come out on top,” Pepper said. “It was a mistake for him not to wait.”
Chris Davis, 23, of Uniontown is fresh out of college and said it’s tough to find a job.
“It’s only going to get worse,” Davis said about the next four years.
Another upset voter, a 64-year-old South Union Township woman, said, “I think the American people are pretty nuts for putting him (Bush) in for another four years.”
Instead of tax money being poured into Iraq, it should be spent at home to help better the Medicare program, she said.
She added that all voters can do now is accept the results of the election.
“You have to eat it. That’s it,” she added. “You don’t have much choice.”
In the next election, she said, former first lady and New York Sen. Hillary Clinton will run.
“And she will win,” she said.
But not everyone objected to Bush’s re-election.
According to Sally Buckingham, 70, of Brownsville, voters chose the best candidate for the job.
“The best man won,” she said, noting she did not mind which man won, as long as he is willing to straighten out the country in terms of the war, terrorism and health care.
Buckingham said the president should work to bring America’s troops home from war.
Relating horror stories of injured soldiers, she said troops have spent enough time overseas.
“I just pray every night that God will do something to help us,” Buckingham said.
The terrorists are in America, Buckingham noted.
“If we just catch the ones that are here, we’d be doing our job,” she said.
Health care, an important issue for both sides, is important for the president to address during his next term in office, she said.
“There are a certain amount of people here who have to give up food to get medicine,” she said. “Everything is entirely too high.”
Although 19-year-old Uniontown residents Andrew McCall and Jeremy Miller did not vote because lines were too long at their South Union Township precinct, they were not surprised that Bush won the election.
“Kerry didn’t have a plan,” said McCall.
“Presidents don’t really matter,” he added.
“They’re just advisers,” said Miller, signaling his hands in quotation marks on the word “advisers.”
Interviewees said they didn’t stay up past midnight to watch the election results unfold.
A few Bush supporters, people who said they voted for the president in this year’s election, would not offer much comment and declined to be identified.
Asked what he expected of Bush in the next four years, a local man who said he supported the president because Bush is a Christian, noted, “He can’t hurt Uniontown too much because it’s already poverty-stricken.”
He added that it might be another 20 years before the nation begins to heal from the Bush-Kerry race, and he doesn’t expect to see it during Bush’s next term in the White House, or in his lifetime.