Are American Voters Stoopid?

The American voting bloc has always left me astounded. Along with the embarrassing number of voters--a mere 50% of the population, compared to over 85% in France--American voters show an uncanny ability to vote against their common interests. As long as a candidate is deeply Christian, smooth on television, and appeals to certain emotional issues such as abortion and gay marriage, we'll vote for that candidate in droves. This is the only logical explanation, as far as I can tell, on how an idiot like George W. Bush was elected TWICE.

Growing up, we are encouraged to make mistakes. "Mistakes are good," one of my grade school teachers would always insist. "Because you learn from your mistakes!" Yet, when it comes to voting, Americans seem incapable of learning from their mistaken votes, no matter what kind of destruction ensues.

I'm blabbering about our idiotic electorate because an interesting evolution is occurring in the Hillary Clinton fan base, now that she has definitively dropped out of contention. See, throughout the primary season, I was as perplexed as anyone on why white/blue-collar workers, whose real incomes decreased as an effect of NAFTA, would openly and fanatically support a candidate who considered NAFTA one of her administrations "great achievements." This was continued "stoopid voterdom," but following the Potomac Primaries, everyone and their dog knew that Obama had the nomination sealed. It was only a matter of time until he was the party's nominee and the Democratic coalition mobilized behind his efforts.

Yet, this stoopid behavior has been built upon now that Obama is our nominee. As a CBS poll from yesterday demonstrated, 22% of Clinton's fan base will support John McCain in November. On NPR's Talk of the Nation today, caller after caller praised McCain for his "experience," and his "maverick" tendencies, and proudly proclaimed that they will support McCain OVER Obama, now that Clinton has bowed out.

See, this confuses me for a number of reasons, but first and foremost it is the topic of issues. These voters are, allegedly, people who supported Hillary Clinton during the primary season. Among the issues on Hillary's platform were a reconstruction of NAFTA, universal health care, withdrawal from Iraq, and a revision of No Child Left Behind, among other liberal, left-leaning stances.* These are Democratic issues, and people who support them are, well, DEMOCRATS. Each issue is something Barack Obama also supports. So if voters felt strongly on these issues, and voted for Hill because they thought she could accomplish the goals of each issue, why would they jump ship to a candidate who openly opposes each and every one of them?

And that's the biggest issue of confusion for me, is how contradictory John McCain is to each of these 22%. John McCain now supports Bush's horrible, idiotic tax cuts, something he boldly opposed in 2001. Not only that, but his tax plan seeks to cut Corporate tax rates by 10%, offering a reduction in government spending to compensate for the cuts--of course, he intends on cuttings funds to Medicare, Medicaid, and education, not defense spending. He supports Iraq and the surge, proclaiming that American forces could be in Iraq for 100 years. He openly lobbied for endorsements from Pastor John Hagee and Rod Parsley, men who have called Catholicism "the great whore" and who claim that Christianity has had an everlasting duty to destroy Islam, respectively (remember when McCain called men like this "agents of intolerance" in 2000? yeah, neither do I). His health care legislation does nothing to stop insurance company fraudulence and refuses coverage to cancer victims LIKE HIMSELF.

John McCain is neither a maverick nor a candidate who represents any Democratic ideals. He WAS a maverick, but now he is nothing more than a slut to the most extreme faction of the GOP that just happened to have won Congress and the White House amid a decade and a half of Washington dominance. So why would allegedly Democratic voters support such a guy? I couldn't tell ya. I guess they're stoopid.

*Bear in mind that all of these issues were nothing more than pandering--the bitch would have been more conservative had the electorate demanded it, but bear with me here.