Takin’ It to the Street
If you’re a registered U.S. voter and regular TMV reader, the chances are quite good that you’re more politically savvy than the overwhelming majority of the rest of the nation’s electorate when they head to the polls.
I’m confident making that claim for three reasons:
(1) I think my co-authors and I do an (ahem) incredible job of covering and opining on political players and developments.
(2) The fact that you’re taking time to read these pages (and probably other pages from other media, old and new alike) means that you’re hungry for knowledge; and knowledge is power; and so on.
(3) It has been my impression (and is increasingly so) that your peers and mine simply don’t care and/or don’t take the time to get informed and get involved.
I further believe we’re all better served by a collectively smarter, more-engaged electorate, and for that reason, I’m a big fan of Project Vote Smart (PVS) and am quite pleased that they’re taking their message to the street, literally.
For those interested, I offer more this morning at Central Sanity about PVS, their “Voter’s Self-Defense System” tour, and what you can do to help.
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3 Responses to “Takin’ It to the Street”
I’m a fan of PVS, too.
At the risk of (further) alienating the authors and readers here, I dare say that being politically savvy is a relatively poor use of our respective time and effort.
What do we get for our time and trouble of monitoring and opining on just about everything that is even tangentially related to politics and society? So we’re better informed, so what? Our individual votes don’t matter, nor do our opinions. For example, and not to single him out, but Shaun goes on and on about Bush, yet Bush is still in office and we’re still in Iraq. All we get is the opportunity to bore our friends at parties with our words of wisdom and have our wifes/husbands/significant others roll their eyes every time they see us typing away. I think we’d be better off with a different hobby… perhaps, dare I say, like those uninformed voters who, if they bother to vote at all, do so on the basis of thinking that drives you all up the wall (like which candidate is taller, who had the nicer tie, who has the prettier wife and so on).
Well Steve I think you have a point, as someone pointed out to me awhile ago most blogs are essentially a circlejerk of like minded people. And while it does seem that there is little effect I am not looking for change today or even tomorrow, but democracies are slow but they get the job done. Mostly I think what we do here is to preserve a record and make people think about the mistakes made in hopes we don’t make them again.
I for one have been forced to rethink my position on a number of issues that I both took for granted and was totally misinformed about. I also now write my congressman and senators quite often. I guess it depends what media like this inspires you to do, its like a jumping point. I’ve also refined what I consider to be the important issues I care about.
On that point, I would like to see more posts concerning the environment and energy policies, as well as economics and lobbying reporting. We do seem to be in a continual loop on Iraq, Bush bashing, and gay GOP officials, which to be honest I think we all know about as much as we can at this point.