I probably shouldn’t say anything in the first place, because voters like Leesa Martin, Phil Niemie and Dave Panici are far more important than voters like me. Given the choices, it’s pretty clear which lever I’m going to pull in the voting both, but these folks who were the focus of so much attention in last year because they were in “undecided voter” category, whom candidates tried to reach and media folk tried to understand. At the time it made sense, because compared to voters like me — whose final decision would be pretty easy to guess — these folks were pretty unpredictable.
But if you ask me, they’re about as predictable as their president. Their buyers’ remorse started just a few months after inauguration, and now — after the war in Iraq and the second term of the Bush administration have turned out pretty much the way folks like me predicted — on the heels of congressional Republicans and Democrats publicly repenting their own backing of Bush in war on Iraq, come the 2004 Bush voters wondering what happened.
Technorati Tags: bush, current events, iraq, politics, war on terror
Leesa Martin never considered President Bush a great leader, but she voted for him a year ago because she admired how he handled the terrorist attacks of 2001.
Then came the past summer, when the death toll from the war in Iraq hit this state particularly hard: 16 marines from the same battalion killed in one week. She thought the federal government should have acted faster to help after Hurricane Katrina. She was baffled by the president’s nomination of Harriet E. Miers, a woman she considered unqualified for the Supreme Court, and disappointed when he did not nominate another woman after Ms. Miers withdrew.
And she remains unsettled by questions about whether the White House leaked the name of a C.I.A. agent whose husband had accused the president of misleading the country about the intelligence that led to the war.
“I don’t know if it’s any one thing as much as it is everything,” said Ms. Martin, 49, eating lunch at the North Market, on the edge of downtown Columbus. “It’s kind of snowballed.”
Her concerns were echoed in more than 75 interviews here and across the country this week, helping to explain the slide in the president’s approval and trustworthiness ratings in recent polls.
And it goes on. Bush voter after Bush voter in the New York Times article expressing dismay over what’s gone wrong, and asking themselves what happened.
Again, I probably shouldn’t say anything because what these folks are concerned about is far more important than anything I might rant about. Voters like me can basically be written off by one party (guess which) and written off or taken for granted by the other party (guess which) because it’s pretty clear where our votes are going to go. It’s not like we have many choices that aren’t basically the equivalent of not voting at all. It’s people like Leesa Martin and her fellow borderline Bush voters who actually decide elections nowadays.
For what it’s worth, I’ll skip pointing out the many ways in which this movie we’re all stuck watching is turning out just the way those of us who didn’t want to see it in the first place said it would turn out. (OK, so I didn’t skip it.) I’ll just way what I said before about how we got to this point, and how Leesa and the rest helped steer us here.
I’ll tell you what happened. You let them scare you. It’s that simple. You let them scare you just enough that you forgot everything else you believe in. You let them make you believe that they, and only they, could keep you and yours alive one minute longer. They repeated “terror” and “9/11″ just enough to to get you marching along with them, and now…only now are you wondering just where they’re actually headed. Now that they’re marching along, full-tilt boogie, trampling a lot of other stuff underfoot in the process; now you wonder if you made the right decision.
Let me make it very plain. No, you didn’t. And you fucked it up for the rest of us in the bargain.
On the evening of the 2004 election, I made the unwise decision of turning on the television to see watch the returns come in. I remember hearing television host Tavis Smiley comment, before the first results came in, that the election would hinge on whether people voted their hopes or their fears. For what it’s worth, and in terms of the electorate it ain’t worth much, I think we know now which way most folks — Leesa, Phil, Dave and the rest — voted, and we see where it got us.
That said, I’ll go back to sleep and let the rest enjoy the predictable flick they picked out.
