I've been ranting a great deal about how voters have lost their minds. It's not as bad as 2000, when we had a pool of mediocre candidates on both sides (though a race between the common sense McCain of those days and Bradley would have been far more interesting), but I suspect that's only because one party has an incumbent. So in an effort to help you not fall into the trap of being an idiot voter, I thought I'd offer some tips to help you cut through all of the bullshit.
The Republicans this year have nearly turned this into a drinking game, with a pissing match about who is more conservativey. When a candidate opens their mouth and utters one of these words, they're offering a convenient escape from addressing any policy points specifically. It's like saying that you're more fragrant. It doesn't say what you'd do about a particular issue, but being fragrant may or may not include the right course of action. The reality is that you just stink.
I had an exchange with a friend who felt that a particular candidate aligned well with her values, contrary to what candidates on the other side were trying to assert. While that makes sense, there is a third, better option, and in this case it's supporting a candidate who isn't trying to assert any values at all. The political spectrum is hung up on black and white absolutes, and nowhere is this more true than in moral issues. When you strip away the absolutes, you start to realize that who someone else sleeps with, or uses birth control, or where and what they choose to worship doesn't matter. It's not the government's business to establish a moral baseline.
Similarly, someone asked why it was OK for a pundit on one side to talk nasty about someone on the other, but the reverse wasn't true. Well, it's not OK either way.
The world is a complex place full of complex issues. If a candidate tries to promise something as a simple solution to a complex problem, your crap detector should go nuts. A lot of our woes around debt and the value of the dollar involve macroeconomics that most of us don't understand. In cases like these, we can take a stab at educating ourselves, or remain blissfully unaware. If you choose the latter, any candidate positions around the issue you don't understand should be disregarded.
Politicians like to promise outcomes for things they can't control. For example, gas prices are all the rage right now. On one hand you have people blaming Obama for high prices, and on the other you have Gingrich suggesting he can get gas down to $2.50. The reality is that gas prices are determined by a combination of supply and demand, commodity trading and geopolitical unrest that skews the former two things. The bottom line is that no president, past, present or future, can alter these forces in a meaningful way. Don't be sucked into promises no one can keep.
I should subtitle this, "Turn off your TV." We all have our biases and experiences that color our perception, and there's nothing wrong with that. Where it becomes a problem is when you do nothing but reinforce your position with rhetoric and nonsense. Right-leaning people have Fox News (which isn't actually news) for this, and left-leaning people have a great many Internet outlets to affirm what they already think. This doesn't make you smarter or more knowledgable, it just makes you an idiot voter. I think we all start out leaning heavily to one side in our youth, and as we get older we gravitate more toward the middle. Or, as I said, maybe we start to see a third option. Unfortunately, too many people start sounding like the candidates.
A friend of mine made the point that it's hard to figure out who the experts are, and where the truth lies. I tend to agree with that to an extent. However, we ultimately can hold ourselves, and the people we elect, to a higher standard if we choose to. We get the government that we deserve, and right now, it feels like we deserve a shitty government. Don't be an idiot voter.
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