Fed up with current American politics?  So are many people, including the Irregular Times and Blue Oregon (albeit in slightly different ways).

For me, it’s not the candidates, nor the discussion they engender, that I tire of, as much as it is the gatekeeper media.  These overpaid teleprompter regurgitators, who insist on making the entire political enterprise an exercise in childish immaturity, and who engage in sanctimonious, hyperactive, capricious parsing of everything that is squirted, belched or vomited out of the mouths of the candidates (as well as everyone they’ve ever met), have sucked any remaining integrity, intelligence or basic humanity from the process.  They are all evil undead who cannot see their own reflections in mirrors.  They have made the democratic process (and the Democratic process) the biggest, saddest joke that the world has ever known (other than, perhaps, Jar Jar Binks).

But perhaps even more insidious than this tendency to cover politics as if it is a race, a contest to be won, instead of a serious discussion about people living their lives and the issues that truly affect them, is the tendency among Americans - the victims of this media dumbing-down-ocracy - to actually buy into this mindset.  We know, for instance, that all of the staffers who work on these campaigns think that this is a race to be won, a popularity contest among people who have probably never been very popular.  This is why they send their candidates bowling, or drinking, or into the umpteenth local diner for the umpteenth photo op with the umpteenth group of blue-collar, hard-scrabble locals that no one will care about once the primary is over.  This is why the 157 debates so far have all been dreadful and tedious.  How can you possibly engage in an intelligent debate when you are walking a constant tightrope between having actual intelligence (which I believe all the candidates have) and the perception among your handlers that being too intelligent will be viewed by the masses - in other words, by someone else - as a kind of elitism?

And, as if it’s bad enough for this ‘political class’ to have this ridiculous mindset, I’ve also noticed a related trend among ‘normal’ Americans that makes me fear, frankly, for the future of the republic.  And that is the tendency for ‘normal’ people to approach the process as if they are, themselves, pundits viewing it from the outside.

I’ve seen several man-on-the-street interviews lately where some reporter asks random people who they’re going to vote for and why.  And inevitably, several of them end up talking about who they think other people want to vote for.  Someone might say, for instance, “Well, I like Obama.  I like him because he appeals to both left-handed and right-handed Pakistanis.  I think Hillary’s main supporters are all left-handed Pakistanis, and therefore, I don’t think she can win.”  Okay John McLaughlin, thanks, but why do you actually want to vote for him?  You are not a reporter, you are a citizen.  You are not a pundit, you are a voter.  You have a responsibility to choose according to your own conscience, not according to a set of absurdly arbitrary rules about who “can” or “can’t” win.  Any candidate can or can’t win.  That’s the whole point of a democracy.

This also went on for years in places like liberal New England (and elsewhere) as a form of covert bigotry, where the conventional wisdom was that, gee, they wanted to vote for a black/hispanic/woman/homosexual/midget, but they just didn’t think that all those nasty people in the south would go along with it.  So they voted for the white guy to make those southerners happy.

This is also tangentially related to a phenomenon that I’ve fallen victim to several times in my life, which is when someone comes up to you and says, “Well, I heard some other people are not happy with this” or “The people I’ve spoken to would all prefer it that way.”  As we all know, this is the coward’s way of telling you their own opinion without actually saying it; they ascribe it to others and then hide behind them.

To which I say this:  Americans, it is time to be self-centered.  (Wait, we weren’t already?)  It is time to elect the person you want to win, the person you think is best, the person you want to see become President.  It is time to stop thinking about what other people might want, and it is way beyond time to stop thinking and acting like a pundit.  Stop analyzing demographics and “electability.”  Stop dividing Americans into absurdly narrow groups and assuming that people only vote with that group (that you assigned them to).  Stop talking about how Hillary’s gender is a problem for sexist men, and stop blathering on and on about whether or not Obama can appeal to racists in a general election.  It is, and he can’t.  Update at 11:00, geniuses!

All of that nonsense turns the whole thing into a silly game.  But what is not silly are the decisions that the next President will have to make about how to get out of Iraq, how to get people back to financial security, how to make our energy sector clean, efficient and independent, how to provide quality health care for everyone, and any number of other things too numerous to name.

For once in your life, America, stop thinking about popularity and group appeal.  Just stop it.  No, seriously, stop it.  And please do not believe yourself intelligent or informed when espousing your theories about what ethnic/religious/cultural/musical/professional/fraternal/regional/sexual groups are going to vote for which candidates and why.  Not only is this not intelligent, it is, in fact, simplistic - and ultimately destructive - and it misses the entire point of an election, which is to ask this question: for whom do you wish to vote?  Not her, or him, or them, but you.  Make up your mind, according to your criteria, go vote, and then we can all move on.

Is that okay with all of you left-brained, southern, Jewish hairdressers who own pickup trucks?  Does that sound appealing to all of you white, middle-class, bi-polar, transsexual Wiccans in Bergen County?  Well, does it?

Either way, I don’t care.  No offense, Dora and Chad.