It’s looking good for the election: Obama’s up 8 in the polls, and seems to have a lock on the electoral college. So why am I suddenly so depressed? True, a glass that’s 54 percent full will – at last! – get us a thinking president, a decent president, very possibly a great president. (Unless the Republicans manage to steal the election, which, sad to say, some of them are working furiously at even as we speak.)
But it’s the glass nearly half empty that’s got me down today. Suppose 130 million people vote. If 46 percent of them pick McCain and Hockey Barbie, that’s an astounding 60 million people. Sixty million! Who are these people? The thinking conservatives – Colin Powell is the latest in a long string – have bailed. That leaves the racists, of course. Sad but true, there are plenty of them. Then there are what the media like to call the “low-information” voters, and this is a big ugly tent indeed.
They include people who are taken in by the McCain campaign’s increasingly sleazy and desperate lies – about Obama being a terrorist, Obama taxing the poor, Obama delivering this great flag-waving country of ours to the international communist conspiracy (which, last I heard, consists of three scraggly old coots in a damp basement in some forgotten corner of Eastern Europe). And then there’s the campaign’s Big Lie – that little Miss Moosewinkle is remotely qualified to be sled-dog-catcher, much less president. (Sorry, I have to reclassify anyone who believes that lie as “no-information.”)
The low-information set also includes the one-issue “pro-lifers,” because their obsession seems to make them incapable of processing any other information. It includes many among the rich, who still harbor the illusion that the dismal Bush tax policies, which McCain vows to continue, will help them in the long run. (Don’t they get it that Bush policies have nearly destroyed the economy?) It includes those who’ll vote for McCain because he’s a veteran, a long-suffering war hero, refusing to see the clear evidence of how erratic and misguided he is on Iraq.
I’ll be charitable and grant that some voters study the issues, think deeply, and choose McCain and Palin, though for the life of me, I can’t figure out why. But to put it bluntly: I live in a country where tens of millions of people are either racist or unwilling to learn even a bare minimum of real information about an election that is crucial to their future and their children’s future. That’s not just depressing, it’s terrifying.