Now that Romney has officially sown up the GOP nomination I guess it behooves me to address the many despairing and pessimistic musings I spilled forth during the unseemly process and ask if I didn't just get it all a bit wrong - ahh, maybe - I still say the primary was made singularly disturbing by fact, once Pawlenty had dropped out, that there was very, very clearly only one person in the race who could make a reasonable claim to being worthy of the nomination and yet the republican electorate seemed determined to ignore that fact for as long as possible - that's disturbing - and if Santorum does a better job of keeping his extremism under wraps till Ohio passed he possibly wins that vote and then who knows what hell breaks loose. And what if Herman Cain's sexual issues don't come crawling out of the woodwork? Sure, the man is such a buffoon it's easy to conclude some other indiscretion or misstep would have eventually upended him, but who knows? The point is Cain should never have even been in the conversation to begin with and yet he was and for a good month or so was sitting on top of the polls.
So, I think I was more right than wrong in my expressed anxieties - hell, let's face it, to any sane and objective observer the irrational aspects of democracy are always going to stir up feelings of doubt, despair and sometimes flat out dread - I mean, I can randomly listen in on any two average citizens having a political discussion and it's very hard to come away from such an encounter and not be muttering "my god, we're all fucking doomed". And it's not my point to be calling the average citizen stupid here - sure, of course, many in this society lack the intellectual wherewithal to judge effectively the finer points of a political debate - and absolutely a depressingly significant percentage of the electorate seems to be either locked into a view point they will not veer from no matter what or to be so lazy, misinformed or otherwise perjured in their perceptions that they are easy prey to grossly simplistic messaging - but I don't know if it's so much a question of intelligence or rather just simply an existential fact governing the way people process information, the way they come to believe what they want to believe. I remember back in 2008 having many arguments with people about Obama, college educated types, people who I would have considered smart, successful people, guys who owned multi million dollar businesses - I alone would be arguing against the Chosen One and they en masse for - but always, when you whittled back their arguments to the essential core of what was motivating them, it always came down to this: electing a black guy will change everything. They couldn't in any logical, coherent way explain to me exactly what the hell that was supposed to mean - I don't think they knew in any real way what it meant - all that mattered was that they believed it to be true and nothing I said had a chance of changing their minds.
Those arguments convinced me of something I had already for some time considered likely - that Obama could actually turn out to be worse than Bush. Welcome to democracy...
