If we could have longer titles, I was going to say “Has it always been this much about election day and this little about supporting a president?”
I’m only 24, so this is only my second presidential election I had any input in and I didn’t pay much attention to the last one once it all went bonkers in Florida, so my memory of that is fuzzy on all but scandal.
To watch the post-election analysis today on TV, it seemed to be made plain that winning the election had very little to do with any kind of true shift in the support of the American people to one side or the other (or reflection of an existing majority of support), and everything to do with simply winning one big day of manipulation like some kind of game to see who could get the right people worked up at the right time.
I’m young and naive and all that jazz, I admit, so I imagine it’s been this way for decades at least, but has it always been so blatant? Has the single election day and the voter turnout game itself always been so candidly discussed as the only thing that matters? I saw no one asking anything like “So what does this tell the Democrats about what America thinks of their ideas?”, it was all “So how’d the Democrats blow this?”, the implication being that clearly there was the support out there, it just went untapped. I’m not even debating the validity of that implication, I don’t want to get into that as much as I just want to know if the elections are always like this. Was there a time when the media at least pretended that selecting our president had something to do with a real reflection of our nation’s lasting support for one candidate over another?
Can’t quite get that out as clearly as I want, but I hope to get some kind of meaningful response.
Well it really doesn’t help that the overall percentages aren’t all that different than 2000, which means that in general the split in ideals of the country is for the most part the same as it was before, so there was no real change there.
However, the increase in voter turnout strongly suggest that the strength of the rift is only getting larger.
Basically people are still believing what they did four years ago, they’re just more pissed about it on both sides, so it’s hard to talk about “a real reflection of our nation’s lasting support for one candidate over another”.
I assume this is at least partially due to the administration’s tendancy to move away from, rather than toward, the center over the last four years. Admittedly, it may be the same as the other side felt when Clinton was in office (although Clinton doesn’t strike me as particularly liberal, I was informed today that that’s only because I’m not conservative enough for him to hit my liberal sensor - I suppose that’s reasonable, since as conservative as the current administration seems to me, there’s certainly far more conservative folks out there as well).
I have no idea what it’s due to, but it does make one wonder what exactly would the President have had to do to get a significant change in the votes that went to him before.
Being a non-fiscally-conservative Republican didn’t do it. All the crap in the leadup to Iraq didn’t do it. The fallout afterwards, with things like Abu Gharib didn’t do it. The fact that Osama Bin Laden is alive and doing well enough to be issueing video tapes in which he comments on our elections didn’t do it. The sluggish economy or job losses didn’t do it.
I think you make a great point here. The Bush Administration has had a serious effect on the level of cynicism in the United States. If you’re not an experienced cynic you’re not going to be able to handle your newfound raise in cynicism, and the media isn’t handling it particularly well. It doesn’t help that politics over the last decade and a half has moved toward partisan showboating and demagoguery… cynicism run amok.
Basically, the media is a pawn. They have no real idea what they’re doing, they’re just flailing about. And now they think they’re all sophisticated and cynical and talk about the “gamesmanship”.
I’d like the media to talk about how they’ve been played. Do something useful with the cynicism.
I thought I had this ironclad action that would ruin Bush. Lets say he’s walking down the street, a pregnant woman walks along, and he reaches up her vagina into her uterus and rips the fetus out. Then he proceeds to jump up and down on the thing, crushing its still-forming spine.
At the very least, the Pro-lifers would go ballistic, right? They would rebel from the Bush camp.
But wait. Rove, mastermind that he is, comes up with a plan. You see, that baby was actually a demon. Maybe even the Anti-Christ. Bush received a vision of this, and actually saved the world by his action. Bush is deemed a Saint, the 2-term presidency restriction is lifted, and Bush is named Holy Lord of the United States for 15 years…
