Rowhouse Logic - Breathtaking Inanity

I had a peak at pollingreport.com this morning and I must admit to being just a bit disturbed. Not that the numbers are at all bad, most of the polls collected show just a three or four point lead for Bush, which doesn’t seem like an unreasonable place for Kerry to be if he is going to win. A number that really disturbed me was the Time poll showing Bush’s reelect at 47%. Now I’ll leave it to Ruy Teixeira and Kos and MyDD to explain the internals, problems with sampling, etc but even taking into account polling problems, what the hell is going on. I mean really, who the hell are these people and where can I find one? What on earth are they thinking?

Now I live in Center City Philadelphia which is the left wing core of an overwhelmingly Democratic town so I guess that explains some of my confusion. Other than hearing a few vaguely pro Bush conversations on the bus once or twice my only other contacts that I know of with Bush voters are second or third hand. You know, some guy a friend of mine met once or a few of my sister in law’s friends. I think my boss may be pro Bush, but I don’t talk politics at work so It’s really just a guess.

Just to give an example of the political climate, I was at my local pizza place during the president’s last prime time news conference, you remember the one where he couldn’t think of any mistakes he had made, and the whole place was laughing at him. I mean really belly laughing and calling him any number of unkind things.

As another example, I went to the Philadelphia inaugural of Drinking Liberally last Tuesday and had a very nice experience but the whole time I was thinking that this really wasn’t all that much different than going to any bar here in town on any night of the week. I mean, you really have to struggle just to find a Republican and the ones that I have run into are not what you would call Bush voters.

Anyway, that 47% reelect number is startling. What are they thinking and why? Now as a progressive I really don’t have any insight into conservative ideology so I’m not the right guy to answer but let me ask a few questions;

• If you believe in sound fiscal policy why would you ever vote for Bush?
• If you supported the war in Iraq and even if you still think it was a great idea, what about the way it has been and is being conducted makes you the least bit comfortable with Bush?
• If criminalizing abortion is the most important thing to you; is abortion any more illegal or any less available than it was in January of 2001? Is it even any less common?
• If you believe that character trumps all else when voting for an elected official, what about this man’s character makes you think he’s your guy?
• If you believe in small, unobtrusive government why on earth would this be your guy?

Let me put my sunglasses on so I can see what they aren’t seeing. Shoot. Didn’t work.

[Update] The polls are probably a little worse than I indicated.

This entry was posted on Monday, September 27th, 2004 at 7:20 am and is filed under Election 2004. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.