Saturday, October 18, 2008

Pick One, Already

Last night Mr. Beale and I went to see essasyist David Sedaris read some of his work. Some of you may know Sedaris from his “Santaland Diaries,” which is a holiday staple on public radio and in community theater groups.

One of the pieces he read last night will appear in next week’s New Yorker and it’s about “undecided” voters. I won’t spoil the fun here but let me just say it was hilarious.

And I agree with Sedaris. If you’re still undecided at this point, you’re a moron and you don’t deserve to be mythologized by the mainstream media. You should be mocked.

This campaign has dragged on longer than any other. There have been debates and thousands of articles written; heck, both candidates have written autobiographies. If you still don’t know which way to go at this point, then you need to do some serious self-examination.

After the Nashville debate the Los Angeles Times wrote:
It's a bit odd that we give the Undecided Voter such a privileged place in American elections. Because from a civic standpoint, few creatures are as contemptible. This election has dominated every form of American news media for the better part of two years. Newspapers, magazines, networks, cable, radio, blogs, people on street corners with signs -- it's really been rather hard to miss. Further, it pits two extremely different candidates against each other. Whether your metric is age, ideology, temperament, race, funding sources, healthcare plans or Iraq strategies, it would be hard to imagine two men presenting a starker contrast.

But despite this, the Undecided Voter wakes up each morning and says, in effect, "I dunno." And the political system panders to him. Undecided voters are believed to be the decisive slice of the American electorate, so they get the debates and the ads and the focus groups (assuming, that is, that they live in a battleground state).

I’m tired of hearing from undecided voters, who at this point are the stupidest people in the American electorate. If you’re so clueless this close to election day, then I honestly wonder how you get up in the morning and find your way out the door with your pants zipped and your shoes tied.

Clearly, the mythic “undecided” is a person who has been too lazy to pay attention or simply doesn’t care that much to begin with. In this election, with so much at stake, that truly is a contemptible position. And frankly, I’m tired of hearing from the people who didn’t give enough of a shit to be following along with this stuff from the get-go anyway.

So, mainstream media, no more stories on the undecided voter. No more interviews or focus groups or panels. These people are morons who should be laughed at, not handed a microphone.

That is all.