Disenfranchised by Banality

What kind of logic says that because Clinton has won the primaries in large states (such as CA and NY), that she is better placed than Obama to win those states in a contest with McCain?

How does this even pass the smell test?

How does a general election, which is a competition between parties, played out among voters of all political stripes, resemble an intra-Democrat election, which involves an electorate that is purposefully politically unrepresentative of the general electorate?

Not only are all elections (with special exceptions for Zimbabwe and other cuddly regimes) governed by more variables than anyone can enumerate, the future effects of those variables are necessarily unpredictable.

What the hell are the media doing? Can someone please go and analyze this claim? Can someone please find an expert, an academic – I’ll even settle for a journalist with a year of college statistics – to give us some real analysis about whether the claim is reasonable even in principle? Then they could at least begin to justify their existence by adding content to the debate (in the broadest ever sense of the term).

While they’re at it, they might also remember that some black dude who’s got a rather good chance of becoming (holding nose) “the leader of the free world” made a rather incisive speech a while ago about a not-so-minor issue – race relations – that made a darned good (and more importantly, honest) attempt to talk to us all as if our brains were larger than our vocabulary of racial clichés.

And what did the great American media decide was the important question to ask? “Did Obama’s speech do enough to make people feel better about the fact that he has a pastor who clearly has different racial views from his?” That bland question is more important, according to salaried talking heads (notice we don’t say “thinking heads”), than engaging a long-overdue public discussion (rather than a trading of over-worn banalities) about one of the nation’s most defining issues.

Please.

It comes to something when political candidates – whom we comfortably despise because their words are thought to be so much less substantial than they are self-serving – say more of substance than an entire industry whose existence is supposed to be in the public interest and so will be justified only when they start communicating and elevating public discourse.

“Best political team on television”? Kind of like saying, “least talkative politician on the campaign trail”.

I hope to God that America doesn’t settle in choosing a president like it does on its media.