The Dial-Wielders

You know who I'm talking about. You probably watched their squiggly reaction lines during the debates more than the actual debates. Maybe you made exasperated noises at them during the panels afterward.

I speak, of course, of the fabled Undecided Voters.

I know one. I work for one at my campus job, actually. To protect the innocent, let's call him Joe the Plumber my Boss. Pretty average guy, as you might expect—has three kids in their teens and twenties, a wife, a house, a job in a managerial position. And, like everyone who hasn't been in a vegetative state for the past couple months, he is extremely worried about our crippled economy, as well as where it might be stumbling to. He holds a healthy American contempt for government, and this had led him to curse both our Republican president and Democratic congress for letting us fall into this hole.

After various conversations over the past weeks, I've discovered that Joe my Boss is every political junkie's nightmare in terms of a voter. Yes, he believes the election is important. However, he does not positively know many of the stands of either candidate. He does not think back more than a year or so to judge a party's competence (I'm wondering if I should bother to inform him that, historically, the economy has done much better under Democrats than Republicans). He does not care about the means the candidates lay out, only the ends they bring (Again, would making Joe sit down and read their policy positions do anything for him?). He sees personalities more than he sees records (Whole opinion on Palin: spunky go-getter. Whole opinion on Biden: pompous elitist). To top it off, he stated that, during a recent gubernatorial election, he changed his mind in the voting booth because of a "gut feeling." Basically, he vindicates every political scientist who ever threw up his hands in disgust at the unwashed, uninformed masses.

To quote Walter Lippmann, "My sympathies are with him [the voter], for I believe that he has been saddled with an impossible task and that he is asked to practice an unattainable ideal." No one, not even the most politically active, can be perfectly informed and have an informed opinion on every issue. This is a given. And yet, what does it say when a significant part of the population is scarily ignorant in the midst of the Information Age—the fact that they vote with their "gut"? The blame can be spread to various parties, from the media circus to the evasive politicians to the undecided voters themselves. Reversing this trend of uninformed voting would take a change in our fundamental culture; a change, unfortunately, I don't see coming any time soon.