A country divided.

Byline: The Register-Guard

There are numerous subtexts to Tuesday's elections: Iraq, terrorism, the economy, North Korea, health care, foreign policy, President Bush's style, etc. But the most remarkable aspect of this week's voting is the sharpness of the political divide within the country.

Races are close at both the state and federal levels. Either major party could win control of the Oregon Legislature, or there could be a Republican-led House and a Democratic-led Senate. The same is true with Congress. That's what's making political prognostication so difficult.

Americans always have had a love-hate relationship with politics, and that has colored the country's political landscape and voting patterns for two centuries. The Civil War locked the Old South into the Democratic column against the Republicans and the Lincoln administration. The Democratic-South marriage was reinforced by the Great Depression and Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal.

The Republicans, meanwhile, built a base in the industrial states and in the West, as the nation's expansion of the 19th century lent political muscle to the independent-minded, go-it-alone settlers. They and their descendants tended to lean toward conservatism and the Republican Party. The pattern held through World War II, with the Democrats holding a slight advantage.

Then came the post-war boom, with millions of ex-GIs filling college classrooms across the land. The country moved slightly rightward when Republican Dwight D. Eisenhower, a war hero more than a politician, succeeded Roosevelt's heir, Harry Truman, as president. The John F. Kennedy years then energized the Democrats, and JFK's assassination in 1963 galvanized the Democratically controlled Congress, spurred on by President Lyndon Johnson, to enact the landmark Civil Rights Act and the far-reaching Great Society legislation.

Then came the Vietnam War, which split the country and led to a resurgance of the Republican Party and the election of Richard Nixon as president. Part of Nixon's political success arose from his and the GOP's inroads into the onetime solidly Democratic Old South (part of which, sadly, arose because of the civil rights movement). Another factor was the emergence of Christian conservatives as a real force on the political scene. Other forces were also at work: the Cuban missle crisis, the thrill of seeing Neil Armstrong walk on the moon, Watergate, the Iranian hostage crisis, the election of Ronald Reagan as president, the collapse of the Soviet Union, wars and threats of wars around the globe, the economic boom of the 1990s, and the dramatic increase in Americans registering not as Democrats or Republicans, but as independents or with third parties.

Together, these and other events and personalities have produced the close political divisions so prevalent today, with a Republican president elected by the arithmetic of the Electoral College rather than by willing a plurality of the popular vote, the Democrats in control of the Senate by virtue of a single Republican defection, and the Republicans maintaining a narrow margin in the House. This week's election will tell us whether that minutely balanced partisan divide is still in place and is likely to remain so for some time to come.