Having It All
The Raven's been having a rough morning trying to get a line on the direction of the upcoming elections, and it took a while before it became clear that the difficulty in this was, in fact, the problem itself.
Our elected officials are getting too clever for our own good. Time was, a politician would take a stand on something, stick his neck out somewhere, proclaim a position. They don't want to do that anymore. For example, look at this from The New Republic:
- "History will probably judge Bill Clinton's bathetic efforts to define the word 'is' to be his slipperiest moment. But that would be to overlook the absurdity of his equivocation over the 1991 Gulf War resolution. 'I guess I would have voted with the majority if it was a close vote, but I agree with the argument the minority made.'"
A master of the craft demonstrating the modern need to hew closely to the center line. The new commandment is, "Thou shalt not alienate half of the electorate." This is why Gore/Bush came right down to the wire and why so many key elections have been since. This is why '02 is both a sleeper campaign that's devoid of excitement and also a model for the future. Each side hires experts who try to grab it all, and so they wind up pitching the same things to the same people until there's no discernable differences between the choices. Coke and Pepsi are easier to distinguish. In the dark.
In California, for example, Republican Bill Simon may have self-destructed with an attack gone awry:
- But the growing dependence on television ads is one of the reasons more than 60 percent of California's voters don't like either Davis or Simon.
Small wonder turnouts are predicted to be at record lows across the country. And from the same TNR article above, here's the other Clinton, showing how to straddle the fence on the Senate floor in defense of her vote on the President's resolution on Iraq:
- "She would back the resolution because bipartisan support will make a strong United Nations 'more likely and, therefore, war less likely.' In other words, Hillary was voting for war because she is against war. We bet even her husband is impressed."
The losers, natch, are you and me, who have to make a decision regarding the shape of the leadership we want and are discovering that both brands are owned by the same company. The risks are getting too large commensurate with the enormous amounts of money being put on the line.
1:49:08 PM 
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Wednesday, October 16, 2002
