I've had the opportunity to get to know a wide range of people over the course of my life, from the homeless to CEOs of Fortune 500 companies, and everyone in between. Despite a vast difference in socio-economic conditions, there is a trait that many people share. They don’t pay enough attention to what is happening in their various government bodies. I’d like to tell you a story that represents the kind of person I’m talking about: the Low Information Voter.
Let me introduce you to Sid (it’s not his real name), one of the guys I met while working in a grocery store. Sid delivered soda pop for one of the major beverage companies. He is a naturally gregarious sort, usually with a fresh joke to recite, and always wanting to talk about whatever was the major topic of the day. In November, a little less than two years ago, right after the elections, he came into the store with his delivery and asked me if I had picked the winners with my vote.
“Not really,” I told him, “most of the guys I wanted to win lost.”
“Not me,” he replied, “most of the guys I voted for won. I used a system. If they were in office, I voted ‘em out. Time to give the new guys a chance.”
I was a little stunned by his choices, especially since our new Governor-elect and new Congressman were both strongly anti-union. Sid held some elected office in his own local union, and had once favored me with a lecture about how minimum wage laws and medical benefits all came about in the workplace because of unions. I told him about the anti-union rhetoric that his candidates had been spouting before the election.
“Didn’t know that,” he said. “But the Governor’s TV ads made him sound a lot better than the other guy.” I was stunned, but I shouldn’t have been. He voted based on TV ads, and the winner had a bigger war chest. His ads played twice as often as his opponent’s ads.
Several months later, I was talking to him out back of the store, as he unloaded his truck. He said that he respected my opinion, and had a question that he wanted to ask. How could I refuse? “Do you think Obama is a socialist?” he asked.
I laughed. Of course I had heard our President called a socialist by the Tea Party extremists and other right wing rabble-rousers, but I couldn’t imagine that anyone took them seriously. I explained that I felt the President was a fairly pragmatic centrist, and then gave him a similar example. “President Obama is politically pretty similar to Richard Nixon,” (well, minus the rampant paranoia) “and I don’t think anyone ever called Nixon a socialist." Sure, Obama wants the really rich people to pay more taxes than the [struggling and disappearing] middle class do now, but the top marginal tax rate under Nixon was a lot higher than what Obama proposed.” I explained that a system with progressive tax rates does redistribute wealth to a certain extent, but doesn’t really qualify as socialism. We’ve had progressive income tax rates for a long time.
Then he asked, “What is a socialist?” It wasn’t the kind of information you get from TV ads, but it is a term brandished on some of the less informative infotainment shows for the purpose of causing unwarranted damage. Apparently because some jerk on TV had said the president was a socialist, it must be true. Obviously he didn’t understand the way that modern American media works.
Recently, I encountered an older man who spoke proudly of his union; he told me that everything he had in life was derived from his involvement with the union at the steel mill where he’d spent his life. He then told me that the company he’d worked for went bankrupt shortly before his planned retirement and was purchased by another company that had been freed of the previous firm’s pension obligations. I joked with him that we now have a candidate for president with lots of experience doing the same thing. When he told me he supported Romney for president, I was more than a bit confused. As a businessman, Mitt had never been a friend to unions.
Then the old man informed me with a single word of his deep-seated bigotry, told me of his fear of a coming uprising of blacks in this country, and how he was convinced that Obama intended to get us into a war with Iran and Russia. I had already quit listening. Racism, paranoia, and most likely large doses of watching Fox News tainted his logic. Sadly, bigotry in his generation was largely the result of institutionalized “education” at an early age, and won’t really disappear until the generation passes away. This guy wasn’t really a Low Information Voter; he was a Misinformation Voter.
Some older voters are rooted in the past, where President Eisenhower was typical of the Republican Party, standing for smaller government when possible while allowing it to provide for the people when necessary. Protecting the rights of citizens as best he could, while warning us of the dangers of a sprawling military-industrial complex that remains a threat to us all. They think that men like LBJ still exist, who could cajole, sweet-talk, and arm-twist the Senate into actually taking action, instead of hiding behind the wall of a threatened filibuster in order to make the opposition look weak. They may half-listen to talk radio and TV pundits, but real information rarely finds its way into their thought process. Sadly, they have become the Old Information Voters.
Then I had an encounter that simultaneously blew my mind and broke my heart. A few days ago, I gave a fellow employee a ride home from work. Ken is a thirty-something year old black man. He lives with his mother and other family members, and takes the bus to work (apparently he doesn’t own a car or drive), although his mother picks him up after work because our city buses don’t run that late. Having just listened to Bill Clinton’s speech at the Democratic National Convention, and appreciating his message and delivery, I asked Ken if he followed politics as we headed toward his home. “Let’s see,” he said, “I know Romney, and Bush-Cheney, and Obama too. Oh yeah, and John McCain and what’s-her-name…Palin.”
I told him Bush and Cheney hadn’t been around for a while, and that McCain-Palin had lost the last election, and weren’t currently running, although McCain was still a senator. He told me that he had seen a video on TV about McCain during the last election that he had liked. The video told McCain’s history, including his time as a POW in Vietnam. Ken told me that he thought it was pretty cool that the North Vietnamese had offered John McCain an early release because “He had some relative in the military,” but he had refused. I explained that John’s father was a Navy four-star admiral at the time, and had been given command over all U.S. troops in Vietnam.
“Yeah,” he agreed, without comprehension. “I thought that was pretty cool. I was going to vote for him, but…ya know, I didn’t.” As it turned out, Ken didn’t bother voting for anyone. I was amazed that as a young black man, living on the brink of poverty, working a part-time job without benefits, would consider voting for the guy running against the first serious black presidential candidate in history. The candidate that offered the most hope for people like him. It didn’t make sense to me. I had encountered my first No-Information Non-Voter. It made me want to scream. In the end, I said nothing. What could I say that would change anything? Here was a guy who just went through life taking whatever was offered, and giving nothing in return. He had no real sense of the issues. McCain’s video had been sufficiently persuasive to influence his decision, because he thought of the Senator as an American hero, and that was enough. Apparently he was doing something else when the Democrats met, and played Obama’s biographical video. Maybe Ken would have been inspired enough to register and actually cast a vote. I doubt that it would have really made a difference.
As I think about it, I begin to wonder if Ken was representative of a significant amount of Americans who just don’t bother to vote at all. Does it really make a difference? I’d like to think that it does. I’d like to think that eventually someone would stand up to the moneyed interests and fight for the vision of America that we were taught to believe in as children. It doesn’t seem to be happening, does it? After all, I voted for change in the last election, and things really haven’t changed that much. The President did manage to get health care reform legislation passed, but it faces repeal after the next election. The Supreme Court has allowed unrestrained money to flow into the election process under the guise of free speech, even if it means that everyone is free to lie.
I had thought that Ken was the ultimate mind-blower. That was until I met a customer that came into the store today. Wearing a dirty and ripped M*A*S*H T-shirt and buying lots of canned goods, she told me that the interest on the $16 billion that America owed (maybe she meant trillions) was coming due and we couldn’t afford to pay it. She said that the elections this year might be canceled. I told her that there had been reports before the last presidential election of the same thing, but it didn’t happen. She said that the drought was going to make it impossible to find food, then added that Social Security was stockpiling ammo, but later (she came back in for more canned goods) she said that maybe it was really Homeland Security that was buying bullets. She said that it was important that I had enough ammo. I assured her that I did have enough ammunition. What I didn’t tell her was that if the shit really hit the fan and anarchy was the rule, the first victim that I would seek was a crazy lady with lots of canned goods. Perhaps it’s better that such people don’t understand the real truth. It would be even better if they would log-off the Internet, shut-off Fox News, and maybe go outside and tend their garden, or maybe try to educate themselves on what is transpiring in the world where real people live. I don’t know if she bothered to vote or not. I don’t even want to come up with a term to describe a voter like her. The only thing that came to mind when she finally left was “Cockoo-Cockoo-Cockoo.”
So what kind of voter are you? Do you even bother to vote? Do TV ads influence you, or do you tune them out completely, focusing on what a candidate's past actions tell you about him or her? Is there anyone running for office that really deserves your vote? Maybe that's the big question.
“If you are bored and disgusted by politics and don't bother to vote, you are in effect voting for the entrenched Establishments of the two major parties, who please rest assured are not dumb, and who are keenly aware that it is in their interests to keep you disgusted and bored and cynical and to give you every possible reason to stay at home doing one-hitters and watching MTV on primary day. By all means stay home if you want, but don't bullshit yourself that you're not voting. In reality, there is no such thing as not voting: you either vote by voting, or you vote by staying home and tacitly doubling the value of some Diehard's vote.”
-David Foster Wallace
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