The Times has another article today on the closeness of this election. It is rather stunning that this race is so close, especially with Bush’s popularity rating at an all time low of 44%. Why are people so unsure of Kerry? Is it his liberalism? Is his policy record and proposals?
I’m convinced that many people make a decision of who to vote for based on who would make the best dinner companion.
Sure people are uneasy about the war and question the intelligence of W., but he might be fun to go out with. He would make some cheesy jokes and goose the waitress. He would be quite happy at the local steak joint and wouldn’t frown if you put ketchup on your prime rib. He would tell funny stories about getting drunk and driving around in his pickup truck.
A day with Kerry would take place at a restaurant with foreign words on the menu and far too many forks on the table. Kerry would go on and on about the ethanol tax and greenhouse gases. There would be some awkward pauses and everyone would just go home early.
I think Americans feel more comfortable voting for a world leader that licks their fingers after eating chicken wings and tosses some balls at a sports bar. Sure, they know that he might not be the sharpest tack in the box, but ultimately people want to vote for a peer. Clinton understood that as he chowed down on Big Macs and fries.
Does this bother me? In many ways, of course. Shouldn’t we want the smartest guy in charge?
But I also think that voting for one’s peer is a testament to our democratic culture. Americans don’t want to worship their leaders or put them on a pedestal. Americans don’t want IQ tests or breeding to determine who rises to the top. Americans don’t want Mr. Perfect.
This principle of equality runs strongly in our culture. And though it might lead to disastrous ends, I admire it just the same.
Apt. 11d 
Laura, it’s not the presidency of the National Honor Society that’s at stake here, its the Commander in Chief of the most successful constitutional republic in the world. And the track record of the so-called “best and brightest” has been pretty dismal for a long time. Governor Clinton ran, and as President governed, as a centrist — this in addition to being a guy it might be fun to hang with. Senator Kerry is running … if he believes in anything at all … as just another technocrat. And a lot of us remember the “just folks” technocrat. That was the nightmare known as the Carter Administration.
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It’s ironic that this “principle of equality” would favor Bush when he (like Kerry of course) is the product of an entirely privileged background. He may act like a good ol’ boy but the kind of good ol’ boys that populate the Ivy Leagues are Old Boy network boys, not Bubba and Joe Bob.
Personally I feel that Kerry is much more my peer than Bush, but then, I’m a die-hard dyed-in-the-wool Massachusetts liberal myself.
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We Sell Dirt
I couldn’t help but smile at this juxtaposition. it’s not really the American people’s fault that they chose, more or less, to let George W. Bush be President, despite his obvious inadequacy to the task. After all, Bush exemplifies the values of their …
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There are a lot of reasons the polls are showing so close; and my suspicion is, it’s not as close as we think. Remember, it was polling that showed Dewey beating Truman, no? Because the pollsters used telephones, which were still a luxury item many Truman voters didn’t have.
Likewise, nowadays many young voters a) are first timers, recently registered, and b) have only cell phones, not landlines. They are not getting polled at all. Gallup has admitted to sampling more Republicans than Democrats. And in my opinion, polls are always a blunt and clumsy tool for predicting elections–many people admit they lie to pollsters about whether they’re registered or plan to vote. Many people register but can’t be bothered to get out of bed on Election Day, especially if they don’t really love their candidate.
And the whole “eating ribs and drinking beer common guy” thing is a piece of marketing, not necessarily conventional wisdom. You can see Bush as a regular guy, or you can see him as the perennial boss’s son, always taking long lunches and letting other people do the work, then getting promoted anyway. Lots of us regular folk have met that guy, too.
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Personally, I’d want to avoid dinner with Bush, given that he’d be smirking, trying to “correct” the menu with nonfactual information about the dishes, angrily shouting down the waiter to respond to comments made at another table, mispronouncing “babyback”, trying to order in a code made up of Supreme Court decisions, he’d keep sending back everything insisting that it wasn’t what he ordered despite security tape showing otherwise, and he’d want his side dishes to “compete” with each other to determine which one was best.
Be better than dinner with the Cheney’s, though, what with everyone sitting quietly and trying to pretend that Mary doesn’t exist.
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When I worked in Mass state government, twenty years ago, the word on then new senator Kerry was, ‘this is a guy who will step on his grandmother’s head to get up a stairwell’. A pompous, unpleasant, vain man. Senate staffers I know now (I live near DC) say nothing has changed.
I don’t vote based on who I would like to have dinner with, but on that criterion, it would be Bush, hands down. Why is he lagging in comparison to George Bush? This guy is Al Gore again, without the charisma.
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The thought of dinner with either of them makes me want to throw up. This might confirm Laura’s conjecture.
In 1992 I joined Socialists for Bush (2 members, mainly on the dinner companion grounds — I can’t stand being around agressively heterosexual men, which is how Clinton always came across, and much prefer smart men who pretend to be inarticulate. This does not favour either candidate in this election; and, in fact, everyone I know who’s met Clinton says that he’s an absolute charmer, so I was probably wrong then.
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Nick — yeah, but there would be all that hostility at the Kerry table, because after the waiter bumped into him, Kerry dropped his dinner roll and called the waiter a fucker.
Harry — Socialists for Bush? Man, you really need to get together with the Jews for Jesus.
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It was Bush 1, not Bush 2. And we rejected the title ‘Spectactularly Ironic Socialists for Bush’ as being too revealing…
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