The choice between Scrooge McDuck and the Kenyan Socialist
Idiot’s Delight
By TIMOTHY EGAN, NYT
You're an undecided voter. Your time is up. The rest of us are sick of pretending to care about you, saying nice things to you, doing your damn laundry.
Decide, O.K.? When the choice was between Scrooge McDuck and the Kenyan Socialist, you couldn't make up your mind. Now that you know it's between two Harvard know-it-alls, with clear, divergent views of government, you're waiting for - what? The long-lost Mormon tablets to reappear? Donald Trump to reveal what his phantom investigators found among the birth records in Hawaii?
No, of course not. To your credit, you don't take your talking points from the toxic menu of far-right radio nor from the conspiracy theorists of the paranoid left. But that's the only nice thing I'm going to say about you.
You're not Solomon, carefully weighing the choices. You're a ditherer. You probably panic at "paper or plastic" in the supermarket, backing up the checkout line. We know all about you, because the campaigns have spent millions studying you, probing you, stuffing you with those little sausage things. Your every emotion is wired and registered.
And here's what we know: there aren't that many of you, not compared with past years. In 2008, 1 in 7 voters was persuadable at one time. This year it is closer to 1 in 20 - about 5 percent. And in your hands, the savants of politics say, rests the future of the republic.
(More here.)
By TIMOTHY EGAN, NYT
You're an undecided voter. Your time is up. The rest of us are sick of pretending to care about you, saying nice things to you, doing your damn laundry.
Decide, O.K.? When the choice was between Scrooge McDuck and the Kenyan Socialist, you couldn't make up your mind. Now that you know it's between two Harvard know-it-alls, with clear, divergent views of government, you're waiting for - what? The long-lost Mormon tablets to reappear? Donald Trump to reveal what his phantom investigators found among the birth records in Hawaii?
No, of course not. To your credit, you don't take your talking points from the toxic menu of far-right radio nor from the conspiracy theorists of the paranoid left. But that's the only nice thing I'm going to say about you.
You're not Solomon, carefully weighing the choices. You're a ditherer. You probably panic at "paper or plastic" in the supermarket, backing up the checkout line. We know all about you, because the campaigns have spent millions studying you, probing you, stuffing you with those little sausage things. Your every emotion is wired and registered.
And here's what we know: there aren't that many of you, not compared with past years. In 2008, 1 in 7 voters was persuadable at one time. This year it is closer to 1 in 20 - about 5 percent. And in your hands, the savants of politics say, rests the future of the republic.
(More here.)
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