« REALLY Briefly Noted | Main | What We Need More Of... »
February 6, 2008
It's Nothing Special Wednesday!
Well, we've survived Super-Duper Tuesday, and it's now Nothing Special Wednesday. Looking at the latest delegates count, the GOP race seems to be widening, and the Dems are still too close for anyone to call.
In his latest pop-ed (it's an op-ed on pop culture) for Entertainment Weekly, Stephen King notes:
One possibly good sign: Hip TV watchers have grown increasingly foxy about the polling process. The age of innocence is over; voters once willing to come clean and say they voted for Mike Huckabee because [Ted] Nugent's "Cat Scratch Fever" loincloth is still the high point of their rock lives are harder and harder to find.
Can I be blunt? I think a lot of voters right now lie right through their teeth when talking to pollsters. And that might be the most optimistic trend in an election year where the coverage has never been dumber or more dubious.
King sees this as a good sign, that voters are starting to think for themselves when they vote rather than listening to the incessant din of worthless blather force-fed them by the media. I'm not so sure.
I firmly believe that athletes are to be seen and never heard. (This isn't a digression, really.) When they open their mouths, if anything intelligible comes out, it's always the same pablum. "Well, we just have to play this game like it's any other game. We really need to come together as a team. We need to give it all we've got." Blah blah blah blah freaking blah. They do this because they know that if they said what they were really thinking, they'd become the next John Rocker and lose their lucrative endorsement deals. So they say what they're expected to say. It's easier, and it keeps everyone happy.
I see the same thing happening in exit-polling interviews. Voters say what they're expected to say, regardless of what they think, and especially regardless of what they did.
So, if you wanted to vote for Obama but you just can't get over that whole race thing, why not strike a blow for color-blindness and tell the nice pollster that you did? When you're walking out of the polling place with your church-going neighbor, what's wrong with telling the pollster that you voted for Mike Huckabee, even though you actually pulled the lever for Mitt Romney because... well, he is kinda handsome? After all, no one will ever know.
And it's not like the government hasn't been lying to us for years about much more important things...
(For more about Cthulhu, click on the image.)
Posted by reparent at February 6, 2008 9:08 AM