"He seems to be straightforward and he wants to rebuild the trust, and that's lacking all over," she said. She had briefly considered Rick Santorum because she liked his emphasis on family values, but decided that the trust issue was bigger.....
"No one trusts Washington anymore," she said.
Seriously? Okay, before I launch into my tirade I should mention that there's a non-zero chance that this woman was talking in code about electability, that she was debating whether the "trust" message or the "family values" message would play better in the general election. But let's assume that this is not the case, and instead she was trying to decide which of these people she herself would most like to be President. If that's the question, then everything she just mentioned is meaningless. What on earth does "rebuild the trust" mean, as a campaign platform? Well, it kind of suggests something reform-y, but there are lots of reforms that various people have favored. And she doesn't exactly seem to be talking about reform. Rather, she just notices that no one trusts Washington anymore, and hears Huntsman echoing this concern, and therefore likes him. As for Santorum, well, we don't know from this article whether this woman is actually a rabid bigot like Santorum, but there's no reason to think so. More likely she just knows that she likes families, and Santorum talks a lot about how important families are.
Do I really need to explain in detail how irrelevant all of this stuff is to what actually happens once someone gets elected? The simple fact that this woman is on the fence between Rick Santorum and Jon Huntsman, for god's sake, is enough to make that perfectly clear. Santorum is probably the craziest, most viciously right-wing person in the Republican field, with a special emphasis on the bigotry and hate, whereas Huntsman, while conservative, is a more-or-less reasonable, sane type, with a particular lack of emphasis on social conservativism. Huntsman supports civil unions, for crying out loud, while Santorum thinks gay parents are worse than no parents! If people were thinking about actual substantive issue positions, the Santorum/Huntsman swing voter would not exist. This woman is casting her vote on an utterly meaningless basis.
Now here's the thing. I know I can't expect all 200 million potential voters in this country to be as obsessed with politics as I am. I emphatically dissent from Rousseau's idea that public affairs should be essentially all that anyone ever thinks about. But every several months we all get to cast a vote in a meaningful election. Some of us chose not to do so; that's a damn shame, but it's our right. But those of us who do really ought to spend the really quite small amount of effort that it takes to find out what's actually at stake. Half an hour of time at a computer would be more than sufficient for a voter like this woman to find out what all of the Republican candidates think about major issues, how they each poll against Obama (more or less), and anything else of major importance to the campaign. Maybe she'd still end up voting for Huntsman (I kind of hope so, since unlike all of the others he seems like a semi-decent guy whose Presidency would not be an unmitigated disaster). Maybe she wouldn't. Hell, maybe she'd discover she likes President Obama better than any of these clowns after all. But one way or another, she'd be casting a vote for a real reason.
Some people occasionally suggest that all of the millions of people who abuse their vote like this, casting it without having the slightest clue what the candidates actually think or what their vote actually means, ought to lose their vote. I am not one of them, not by any stretch of the imagination. But I just don't understand it when someone votes like this. I just don't get how you fail to spend a few minutes a few times every four years learning about the things that are going to matter so tremendously much. And I really don't understand why we're all supposed to find people like this woman kind of admirable, the idyllic "normal" voter, while genuinely high-information voters like myself are slightly looked down on. Of course that particular bias isn't a universal one, but the low-information swing voter does tend to get a lot of praise heaped in their general direction.
I do have a few theories about why people care so bloody little in this country. My personal favorite explanation is the term-limits drive: obviously it's not the biggest factor, but the whole idea that incumbents can entrench themselves against the will of the voters, which is false by definition, strikes me as having been part of an effort to convince voters that they're powerless. Left-wingers are complicit in this much more than they mean to be, I imagine, particularly in our response to the whole money-in-politics thing. We want to make the case that the money does matter, because that bolsters our case for regulating it, but sometimes we forget to tell voters, you know, the money only matters if you let it matter. Corporations still can't vote; only voters can do that. But we don't say that; instead, we allow ourselves to mutter in public about how hopeless everything is because of all the corporate money etc. Hopelessness leads people to neglect what power they possess; it's self-fulfilling. (This is part of why I'm against constitutionalizing a rule against gerrymandering, by the way, because of the whole voter-powerlessness thing.)
Oh, and one last aside: if the woman was talking about electability concerns, then she should just look up how the various people poll versus Obama in major national surveys. Of course, Huntsman's lack of name recognition means he does worse than I imagine he'd end up doing, but still, objective evidence is always a better foundation than wanton speculation.
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