I appreciate comments I just read regarding the lesson we learn from the New Hampshire primary. The writer, a political columnist from “TheStreet.com,” says we learned that voters care more for experience than they care for image, according to his take on the New Hampshire wins by Clinton and McCain. That sounds good — it sounds much more optimistic than I feel about what we REALLY know about voters and why elections are won or lost.
I think what we learned from New Hampshire is exactly this: People vote for the candidates they THINK are the most experienced and competent. It’s all perception. I offer as evidence:
For more than 30 years various anti-abortion voters, in large numbers, have contributed to the election of presidents, senators, governors, etc., who are firmly “pro life,” i.e., defined as anti-abortion. Yet I cannot recall a single governor, senator, or president who has reduced abortions in this country by doing anything advocated by the anti-abortion voters who elected them.
In other words — people vote NOT because a candidate is experienced or competent, as seen by concrete results, but because that candidate has convinced them that he or she is the most experienced or competent.
So how do we know for whom we should vote? Are we stuck forever on a political treadmill, destined to go around and around like the old Kingston Trio “M.T.A.” rider who “…rides forever neath the streets of Boston…”? (You wondered where I was going with that Kingston Trio title, didn’t you?) We really can’t “know” who should get our vote. But we can try our best to study not just what the candidates say but what they have done and are doing.
Yes, that includes meeting, greeting, and handshaking with all those candidates we can meet. But it also means doing some homework beyond the newspapers and especially beyond the television presentations of the meeters and greeters. It means digging into candidates’ performance records, and it means digging into the issues. Why should John McCain’s experiences in Vietnam mean he has anything to say about U.S. international and defense policies today? How will Hillary Clinton’s experiences as a senator and as a former First Lady affect her abilities to confront terrorism or make things right in Iraq or with Iran?
Above all, we must remember that individual candidates, if elected, can make a difference — but they cannot make ALL the difference. The “change” everyone in America says they want can only come about as we give the boot to all this horrid partisan squalling of the last decade or so and learn to live and work together.
Ah, well, I’m not qualified to be your civics or economics teacher. Take all this for what you will, I’m just a guy who reads the papers.
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