Did you hear the This American Life episode on swing voters? (It's 10/29/04, if you want to listen.) Ira chats with an undecided-voter pal of his and realizes that this guy agrees with him and with John Kerry on every issue he cares about -- but he still can't bring himself to vote for Kerry. My angry, uncharitable conclusion: many undecideds know what's the right thing to do, but they can't muster enough moral courage actually to do the right thing and press the touch screen next to Kerry. Whatever has them drifting Bushward -- fear, bigotry, greed -- it's not something they can defend out loud. So they claim to be undecided when in their hearts they're for Bush. They claim that Kerry has no position, but they blank when you ask them if they've ever visited the Kerry web site. They assert that character is important, but they change the subject when you try to figure out which candidate actually wins on character. They say that they're still collecting information, but you never see them looking anything up.
This is interesting: I often hear, either directly or indirectly, people falsely complaining about dem politicians in the manner of accusing them to be for X when they aren't, or for accusing them for not addressing Y when they have. Maybe someone with a better of the other side can help: does this happen to Republican candidates as well?
Political scientists have known for at least fifty years that most voters don't vote based on what policy wonks would consider a rational analysis of the issues. If this TNR writer is surprised by what he sees, that may be part of the Democrats' problem.
I think what is truly sad is that Democratic Party elites seem unable to understand that Clinton didn't win despite his cheating, but because of it, and Bush didn't win despite his alchoholism, but because of it. We like our President's to be human rather than simulacra. To connect this up with the post on The Incredibles, errors are life-like, and the lack of them are what make cartoons look not-life-like.
We Dems keep putting forth cartoon politicians and then wondering why people choose the human over anatomically correct Ken. I think when you are suspicious of the predictive power of policy makers, you ignore specific policy and just choose the human.
I think SCMTim has it completely backwards. Americans don't vote for presidents because they're human, they vote for them because they're cartoons. Reagan marketed himself as a cartoon cheerleader for American strength. Clinton sold himself with a crafted persona of drippy faux-personal charm.
Bush didn't succeed because of his actual, human personality; whenever that comes through - in those unscripted moments, in those debates - people recoil. He succeeds because of a thick glop of party branding and war iconography plastered over the walking disaster of his administration. People vote for him not because they think Iraq was a great idea that's going just swell - in fact, the majority of Americans think iraq is either going very badly or was a mistake. What happens is people have been taught to accept the icon first, and apply that trust to his administration, his party, and his policies second. Hence, Americans think Bush fucked up iraq, but they think he does a great job on the generic issue of "terrorism" - despite the fact that Bush himself insists that Iraq is central to the war on terrorism.
Democrats thought they could win on issues in this campaign; they were very wrong. We need to win on style, on message and communication. If we get ANY traction going here it should work wonders, because we do have the facts on our side. It's just that the facts, by themselves, don't matter all that much.
The quoted section gives me great hope for the future of the country. Disbelief is the only intelligent response to the claim that one of Kerry's many "plans" would lower health care costs. My hope is that one day it truly won't matter who is elected president or to Congress because government won't do anything significant enough to the lives of individual citizens be worth caring about.
My secret suspicion is that my hope has already been achieved.