A friend of mine offered the opinion that "When push comes to shove, I think a lot of Americans end up voting for the candidate they like the best." This was my reply (which I have very slightly rewitten for posting here):
I think you are absolutely correct about this and, as much as we might prefer that decisions be made on a more rational basis by comparing each candidate's programs, policies and ideas, it's probably inevitable that it will always be that way. Many people (maybe most people) either don't have the time (or, probably, the inclination) to do such an in-depth analysis or wouldn't know how to go about doing it even if they realized they should, so they fall back on our innate human abilities to judge the character of other people from their looks, their social behavior, the way they dress, how they talk, their body language etc., all the things we use on a daily basis to protect ourselves and our families from harm, to form friendships and alliances, and, in general, to navigate through life.
These capabilities can be pretty damn good under many circumstances (if they weren't, more folks would be victimized by bad people than is the actual case), and as a result we all get a sense that we know how to judge good folks from bad ones -- and why not, all of us have survived, which is the ultimate scorecard.
Unfortunately, our confidence in our ability to sort out the good from the bad is probably misplaced, because in everyday life we don't frequently come across people who excel in the skills needed to fool our innate bullshit detectors, so we really haven't been tested as much as we think we have. (I'll venture what might be a controversial opinion and say that people who live in urban areas, with their higher population densities and therefore their larger number of daily personal interactions, may be more able to make an accurate assessment because they get more practice, and tend to come across more bad people -- who accumulate in those areas because of the larger number of potential victims.) The people who have the skills necessary to fool us -- actors, celebrities, politicians, con artists, salespeople etc. -- can get through our screening and make us believe that their public personas are real, and not simply devices to get from us what they want.
So that's where the danger lies, that people vote for the guy who seems the nicest, or the most "regular" or normal, the one you'd wouldn't mind having over for dinner or to watch a football game, but some of the people they're asked to evaluate are exactly those who have reached the top of their profession in part by having the ability to fool others about who they are. Many of us saw through Bush's down-home just-one-of-the-boys persona to see the hard, vindictive sombitch which lives under it (and which still, I think, regardless of his status as a supposed "born-again" Christian, drives his personality), but enough people believed his shtick to put him in the position to be able to steal the election.
(And just a reminder that while Gore definitely won the election, the popular vote was a lot closer than it should have been considering the relative abilities of the two men. Still, Gore, for all his supposed relaxed and comfortable private personality, doesn't come across as someone you want to spend a lot of time with -- you get the feeling that he'd always be on the verge of lecturing you about some wonky thing or another, which would get annoying real fast.)
I suspect that the subtext for the debate about Dean's "electability", while usually couched in terms of whether unaligned voters in the South, or "Reagan Democrats" or "moderates" would accept him as a candidate, is really all about whether he's got the chops to make people like him, which is the preeminently necessary ability to win an election in the age of mass media, and which differs significantly from the ability to make people excited or roused or ready to do battle, which is what wins primaries.
So here, I think, is something that gets a little closer to the truth about why Bush is in the White House right now -- not because people in general, or Americans in particular, are stupid, but because people have more confidence than they should have in their ability to judge the character of other people, and use that ability instead of examining things on a more rational or analytical basis. And that does, indeed, make things more difficult for Dean, whose gestalt is basically negative: angry and on the attack.
[Thanks to Ves for the comment I responded to and Margit for the encouragement about posting it here.]
absolutist
aggresive
anti-Constitutional
anti-intellectual
arrogant
authoritarian
blame-placers
blameworthy
blinkered
buckpassers
calculating
class warriors
clueless
compassionless
con artists
conniving
conscienceless
conspiratorial
corrupt
craven
criminal
crooked
culpable
damaging
dangerous
deadly
debased
deceitful
delusional
despotic
destructive
devious
disconnected
dishonorable
dishonest
disingenuous
disrespectful
dogmatic
doomed
fanatical
fantasists
felonious
hateful
heinous
hostile to science
hypocritical
ideologues
ignorant
immoral
incompetent
indifferent
inflexible
insensitive
insincere
irrational
isolated
kleptocratic
lacking in empathy
lacking in public spirit
liars
mendacious
misleading
mistrustful
non-rational
not candid
not "reality-based"
not trustworthy
oblivious
oligarchic
opportunistic
out of control
pernicious
perverse
philistine
plutocratic
prevaricating
propagandists
rapacious
relentless
reprehensible
rigid
scandalous
schemers
selfish
secretive
shameless
sleazy
tricky
unAmerican
uncaring
uncivil
uncompromising
unconstitutional
undemocratic
unethical
unpopular
unprincipled
unrealistic
unreliable
unrepresentative
unscientific
unscrupulous
unsympathetic
venal
vile
virtueless
warmongers
wicked
without integrity
wrong-headed
Thanks to: Breeze, Chuck, Ivan Raikov, Kaiju, Kathy, Roger, Shirley, S.M. Dixon
recently seen
i've got a little list...
Elliott Abrams
Steven Abrams (Kansas BofE)
David Addington
Howard Fieldstead Ahmanson
Roger Ailes (FNC)
John Ashcroft
Bob Bennett
William Bennett
Joe Biden
John Bolton
Alan Bonsell (Dover BofE)
Pat Buchanan
Bill Buckingham (Dover BofE)
George W. Bush
Saxby Chambliss
Bruce Chapman (DI)
Dick Cheney
Lynne Cheney
Richard Cohen
The Coors Family
Ann Coulter
Michael Crichton
Lanny Davis
Tom DeLay
William A. Dembski
James Dobson
Leonard Downie (WaPo)
Dinesh D’Souza
Gregg Easterbrook
Jerry Falwell
Douglas Feith
Arthur Finkelstein
Bill Frist
George Gilder
Newt Gingrich
John Gibson (FNC)
Alberto Gonzalez
Rudolph Giuliani
Sean Hannity
Katherine Harris
Fred Hiatt (WaPo)
Christopher Hitchens
David Horowitz
Don Imus
James F. Inhofe
Jesse Jackson
Philip E. Johnson
Daryn Kagan
Joe Klein
Phil Kline
Ron Klink
William Kristol
Ken Lay
Joe Lieberman
Rush Limbaugh
Trent Lott
Frank Luntz
"American Fundamentalists"
by Joel Pelletier
(click on image for more info)
Chris Matthews
Mitch McConnell
Stephen C. Meyer (DI)
Judith Miller (ex-NYT)
Zell Miller
Tom Monaghan
Sun Myung Moon
Roy Moore
Dick Morris
Rupert Murdoch
Ralph Nader
John Negroponte
Grover Norquist
Robert Novak
Ted Olson
Elspeth Reeve (TNR)
Bill O'Reilly
Martin Peretz (TNR)
Richard Perle
Ramesh Ponnuru
Ralph Reed
Pat Robertson
Karl Rove
Tim Russert
Rick Santorum
Richard Mellon Scaife
Antonin Scalia
Joe Scarborough
Susan Schmidt (WaPo)
Bill Schneider
Al Sharpton
Ron Silver
John Solomon (WaPo)
Margaret Spellings
Kenneth Starr
Randall Terry
Clarence Thomas
Richard Thompson (TMLC)
Donald Trump
Richard Viguere
Donald Wildmon
Paul Wolfowitz
Bob Woodward (WaPo)
John Yoo
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recent listening
influences
John Adams
Laurie Anderson
Aphex Twin
Isaac Asimov
Fred Astaire
J.G. Ballard
The Beatles
Busby Berkeley
John Cage
"Catch-22"
Raymond Chandler
Arthur C. Clarke
Elvis Costello
Richard Dawkins
Daniel C. Dennett
Philip K. Dick
Kevin Drum
Brian Eno
Fela
Firesign Theatre
Eliot Gelwan
William Gibson
Philip Glass
David Gordon
Stephen Jay Gould
Dashiell Hammett
"The Harder They Come"
Robert Heinlein
Joseph Heller
Frank Herbert
Douglas Hofstadter
Bill James
Gene Kelly
Stanley Kubrick
Jefferson Airplane
Ursula K. LeGuin
The Marx Brothers
John McPhee
Harry Partch
Michael C. Penta
Monty Python
Orbital
Michael Powell & Emeric Pressburger
"The Prisoner"
"The Red Shoes"
Steve Reich
Terry Riley
Oliver Sacks
Erik Satie
"Singin' in the Rain"
Stephen Sondheim
The Specials
Morton Subotnick
Talking Heads/David Byrne
Tangerine Dream
Hunter S. Thompson
J.R.R. Tolkien
"2001: A Space Odyssey"
Kurt Vonnegut
Yes
Bullshit, trolling, unthinking knee-jerk dogmatism and the drivel of idiots will be ruthlessly deleted and the posters banned.
Entertaining, interesting, intelligent, informed and informative comments will always be welcome, even when I disagree with them.
I am the sole judge of which of these qualities pertains.
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Corrections
I correct typos and other simple errors of grammar, syntax, style and presentation in my posts after the fact without necessarily posting notification of the change.
Substantive textual changes, especially reversals or major corrections, will be noted in an "Update" or a footnote.
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the story so far
unfutz: toiling in almost complete obscurity for almost 1500 days
If you read unfutz at least once a week, without fail, your teeth will be whiter and your love life more satisfying.
If you read it daily, I will come to your house, kiss you on the forehead, bathe your feet, and cook pancakes for you, with yummy syrup and everything.
(You might want to keep a watch on me, though, just to avoid the syrup ending up on your feet and the pancakes on your forehead.)
Finally, on a more mundane level, since I don't believe that anyone actually reads this stuff, I make this offer: I'll give five bucks to the first person who contacts me and asks for it -- and, believe me, right now five bucks might as well be five hundred, so this is no trivial offer.
