Do you think there’s anyone on Earth who wants a Democratic victory Tuesday more than Tina Fey? Last night marked the fourth week out of five that Fey did her spookily good Sarah Palin. Does the woman ever sleep?
Will the fact that John McCain fairly killed on Saturday Night Live (videos below) make any difference in the outcome of the election? I’m not sure, but I’m also not sure that given that my vote pretty much doesn’t count – really, you think DC is ever going to vote for a Republican – the only reason for me to go to the polls on Tuesday is that there are downticket races (city council, school board, and ANC) that not voting in might make an impact.
A lot of more alert people with a lot more time on their hands have spent a lot of air time and soy ink over the past few weeks trying to figure out who exactly could still be undecided about the presidential race after 20 months of hard sell campaigning. Are they your classic rube – doesn’t read news, doesn’t care to read news – you know, the kind of people who call their friends, or even the local head of a non-profit group they’re a member of, from the voting booth to ask who they should vote for? Or are they lying to pollsters because, truthfully, that’s actually a lot of fun? Or maybe they’re like me, sales resistant and the more you pressure them the less inclined they are to buy.
That sales resistance, I think, is what causes a lot of people to stay home. At my day job I handle the external communications to our membership. Since August 16th we’ve sent out messages to over 900,000 people about one election or another and universally the feedback we’re getting is “Don’t tell me how to vote.” Given that the rule of thumb is that every piece of feedback you get represents seven pieces of feedback of the same ilk that no one bothered to send, that’s potentially a lot of people who just don’t want anyone messing with their own personal electoral process, and maybe they have a point.
While it’s true that the electoral college is totally outdated, we’re not quite ready for one citizen one vote – a society that can come up with iPhone can’t make a secure voting machine? it’s enough to activate the conspiracy theorist in me; on the other hand, I live in the same city that can’t plan for how to handle extra crowds on the subway on Roe v. Wade day and it happens on the same day every damn year – maybe those people stubbornly clinging to their undecided status have just arrived at the point where they don’t want anyone in their business.
We started out with a system in this country where the runner-up in the general election got to be Vice President. Two hundred and thirty-two years later we’re at a point where we’re so inundated with election “news,” tidbits, rumors, and infomercials that it’s virtually impossible to get a quiet moment to consider what the candidates actually stand for (or what they say they actually stand for vs. what the media say they stand for).
The thing of it is, though, that if you don’t exercise your franchise, even if all you do is go to the polls and blindly vote the full party ticket in every race, do you really have a right to bitch about how the country is run? It speaks to the last gasp of the optimist in me that I want to say no.
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