Jesse at Pandagon Hears What I've Been Hearing

Undecideds exist in large part because they’re fetishized for existing, and because they’re continually given all the tools of false equivocation and wrongheaded cynicism in order to justify that self-promoting fetish. There are only two real tools needed to remain undecided, because they cancel each other out - the first is the driving, voracious hunger for “specifics” and the second is the unyielding hatred of anything even resembling “not talking to people like me”. A plan to do X is both lacks specifics because the person describing it said it in a straightforward fashion with the assumption that they would use the requisite abilities of their job to accomplish it and, when the details of doing it are revealed, it lacks the “everyman” quality that the first statement had. Then, having been led to assume that the style of delivering drastically different plans falls into one of those two categories at every juncture, undecideds then get to assume that there’s no real difference between competing politicians because they all say the same thing (by which they mean it falls into one of two vague categories of delivery).

I actually heard a republican leaning small business owner discuss how unhappy he was that "neither of the candidates" in the debate "seemed to connect with him" and "his problems" as a "small business owner" because, as far as I could tell from his garbled account, he owned an LLC with his wife grossing 300,000 a year and it was all booked as income and taxed as income but really plowed back into the company and...." He was actually leaning towards Obama and felt that McCain "came from money" and "three admirals" and wouldn't understand him any better. But its clear that he listened to the debates hoping that Obama would turn to the camera and do that old "romper room" thing of looking through a fake mirror and saying "I see bobby and his wife. They are booking 300,000 in income but under my plan we would convert that "income" into corporate losses and they would actually get money back from the government. Sleep well, bobby!"

aimai