Not surprisingly, The New Yorker has endorsed Obama. Also not surprisingly, they give an excellent, clear, carefully considered, and factually-based argument in favor of Obama.
Sadly, I’m afraid this kind of endorsement won’t be enough. If this election was going to be decided simply on cold hard facts and rational thinking about who is going to be the best leader for this country in crisis, Obama could schedule his inauguration right now. Unfortunately, we live in Reality TV Nation, where the presidential election has become nothing more than a popularity contest in which the future of our country hinges on who can come up with the best sound bite. Maybe I have too little faith in the American public, but I have a feeling there are a lot of fairly intelligent but lazy people (along with a whole mess of total idiots) in this country who have been sucked in by the Republican misdirection, and are going to base their vote in the most important election in half a century entirely on the image of a pitbull with lipstick. Look over here, public. Watch the pretty lady, don’t think about that stuff that hurts your brain like the economy (which, by the way, we have no solutions for, because we don’t actually want to fix it). Call me a pessimist, but I fear for the next four years.
On the other hand, if McCain wins, maybe California and New England will secede from the U.S., and I can move back near a beach.
P.S. Have our standards really become that low for our leaders that anyone can crow about how well someone did in a debate just because she didn’t screw up? The whole VP show was pretty disappointing anyway. Trading 30-second sound bites doesn’t really qualify as much of a “debate”.
UPDATE: Happily, I was wrong, and the American public exceeded my expectations for once.
2 comments:
Your lack of optimism frightens me, young man. I'm praying and hoping and thinking positively that more people will vote, and those that do will be smart enough not to give into the hype.
And if not, we must each offer ourselves up one day a year to personally help protect John McCain from any physical harm so as to prevent the ludacris lady from killing us all.
I hope you're right. It would be hard for me to protect McCain from my new home in the south of France.
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