Wednesday, March 14, 2012
What would happen if in some magical world you could put Paul Ryan and Obama together in a room and have them debate for three hours healthcare and entitlements and budget deficits and tax reform and then force every voting age person in America to watch it? What percentage of the electorate would come away from that debate with a thorough enough understanding of the details, not vitiated by bias, to form an enlightened judgement on who won, who was more in the right? One percent? Two? Possibly at the most five percent? And yet somehow we're convincing ourselves that the election in November is going to set us on a path to fix our problems? How exactly? Pure luck? A deus ex machina? At what point does democracy devolve into an exercise in willful ignorance generated out of fear or laziness or the decay of incoherence?
