Don't Lose Faith

Yesterday I reminded two conservative friends that it would be stupid to buy the media hype and give up this close to the election, thinking all is lost and being too depressed to go punch the chad. Happily one replied, "Are, you crazy?" (I get that a lot) "No way I won't vote." But it is easy to get discouraged, what with 7 out of 10 news stories being about how either John McCain is George Bush, or how Barrack Obama is Jesus Christ.

You can see what they're doing. It's like Microsoft is hyping Vista, or Al Gore hyping Global Climate: there is the hope that they can get so many people on the bandwagon that it won't matter that the climate is cooling or that the operating system is a yawn.

I don't think they can sell this New Coke:

"The original bandwagon theory is that people don't want to miss the party," said Samuel Popkin, a political scientist at the University of California at San Diego and the author of “The Reasoning Voter: Communication and Persuasion in Presidential Campaigns.”

"There will be somebody in the end who says, 'I don't want to vote for him because he's black, but McCain's going to lose so I'll vote for him to tell my grandkids I did,'" Popkin said.

But, he added: "I think what's more likely is if you see a poll that says people in your congressional district have changed, you're going to say, 'What's going on?' ... If you read in the paper [that] Obama's crowds are bigger than ever, his lead is growing, you think, 'I better double check. What have I missed? What's new that I didn't know?’”

I'm thinking that the more people who look into the candidates the better. Sooner or later you have to notice that the One has never really accomplished anything. He calls for a transformation of America into the Country With a Heart. He says he's going to take care of everybody. But ask the Kenyan school he promised to help, ask his slum-residing aunt, or his impoverished half-brother how much Obama helps people. Obama talks a good game, but he's never really helped when it was his job to help. Go back to the Chicago slums he community-activized; how much better off are those residents today? Obama's slum-lord friends and mentors were the big winners there.

I say go ahead and look into Obama, the candidate. With all the ink and pixels out there, there is a gaping hole where the list of accomplishments should be. Newt said it best, "I don't know of a single thing Obama's done except talk and write."