Voters May Have Spoken But The Message Makes No Sense [View all]

[TexasTowelie]

By Carol Morgan

My 91 year old mother is always right. Always…

After every election she makes her routine pronouncement that goes something like this: Voters go to the polls not knowing why they’re voting or who will best represent their views. They don’t even know what they want, much less, who’s going to do it for them.

The number crunchers, bean counters, and data miners are frantically disaggregating the data from Tuesday and it echoes my mother’s wisdom.

Arkansas, Kentucky and West Virginia, the states that saw substantial drops in the proportion of their residents without insurance? They all elected Republican Senate candidates who oppose the Affordable Care Act.

Weird…

Reuters’ Mike Corones wrote an article on this bizarre post-election revelation mentioning all the holy crap moments in the world of America’s confused voters. The voters spoke, but we have no clue what the message was.

This observation from a Twitter political watcher: @bencasselman: “So voters want a higher minimum wage, legal pot, abortion access and GOP representation. Ok then…”

Yes, Ben, it’s confusing…I felt the same way. It does not compute.

And another: @jodyavirgan: “5/5 vote to raise the minimum wage; 3/4 to legalize weed; 6/7 to elect Republican senators. America, you’re a very interesting place”.

The issues on the ballot and the politicians who will administrate them do not match. The policies that voters embrace are the very issues that the GOP is against.

It reminds me of the cover of the UK’s Daily Mirror, the day after GWB’s reelection, which asked, "How can 59,054,087 people be so DUMB?

Why is this happening?

Just look at PoliTech’s video of Texas Tech students and how little they know and then, you’ll understand. Students couldn’t name the vice-president or who won the Civil War, but they knew everything about Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie.

Media should be educating voters and parsing issues, but they’re not. They eschew uncomfortable confrontations that would a shine a light on what matters, because it might anger one of their corporate sponsors.

A free press should be the lifeblood of a democracy, but I’m afraid it’s bled out. That lifeblood is somewhat anemic now. Afraid of losing their livelihood, many journalists are afraid to offend. It’s easier to go along to get along and make nice with people, than to lift the veil from unpleasant truths.

With very few exceptions, the majority of local reporters have willingly become Lubbock’s newest eunuchs, because journalistic courage has consequences. Much of the local post-election coverage read like an advertorial for the winners. The only thing lacking was “I approve this message”. No difficult questions asked, no specific answers offered.

Over the next few months, voters may be scratching their heads. They will claim they didn’t vote for cuts in Social Security and Medicare or tax cuts to billionaires or a blank check for energy to foul our air and deplete our water supply, but they did.

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Carol Morgan is a career/college counselor, writer, speaker, former Democratic candidate for the Texas House and the award-winning author of Of Tapestry, Time and Tears, a historical fiction about the 1947 Partition of India. Email Carol at [e-mail] , follow her on Twitter and on Facebook or visit her writer’s blog at www.carolmorgan.org

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