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You Aren't Going to Believe . . .

March 07, 2008

. . . what I did this week.

I registered to vote.

No kidding. I walked boldly into the West Tisbury town hall, filled out a card, and left it on the town clerk's desk.

Why, and why now? My registration lapsed when I moved from Vineyard Haven to Edgartown in late 2001, and I didn't reregister when I moved back to VH early the following summer. John Kerry was a lackluster senator and a less than inspiring presidential candidate, and while plenty of people had good reason to consider voting against Bush a patriotic duty, in Massachusetts such people are so thick on the ground that the absence of one more wouldn't be noticed -- and it wasn't.

In the wake of the 2004 election I did start paying somewhat more attention to the national news than I had been doing for the previous 20 years. What woke me up was less Dubya's re-election than the caterwauling of the clueless urban liberals who were trying to account for it. Red state, blue state, whassamatta wid Kansas, don't think of an elephant
. . . What the hell planet were these people living on? When I take my own frustration-bordering-on-fury with clueless urban liberals, progressives, and lefties (LPLs) and subtract my long personal history, my deep-rooted convictions, and my lack of exposure to televised news -- voting for Bush et al. starts to seem downright explicable.

The LPLs often rail endlessly against the mainstream media -- they've even got an acronym for it: MSM -- while displaying a somewhat contradictory faith in the possibility of a well-informed electorate. It's possible to become well informed, of course, but not unless you're willing to become a full-time researcher, textual analyst, and rune reader. Unless you're willing to do serious research, the information you get about presidential candidates is heavily influenced by each one's ability to raise money and hire clever handlers. These are significant skills, to be sure, and they're not unrelated to presidential potential, but figuring out how they're related is a crapshoot.

Even back in the day when I could pontificate endlessly about this one's record and that one's speech, I voted pretty much by gut feeling, which was almost invariably confirmed by what most of my friends were saying. how we read this and analyzed that and compared this one's record to that one's record. What most of us well-informed voters are doing is dressing up our gut feeling in somber clothes so we can take it out in public. That fall, after reading a bunch of stuff by and about John Edwards, I had this strong gut feeling that he was my man. If he's still in the race on January 1, I vowed, I'll register to vote. He was still in the race on January 1, but I missed the registration deadline and by the time the Massachusetts primary rolled around (on "Super Tuesday," February 5) Edwards had withdrawn. I was off the hook -- sorta.

Trouble is, by then I'd begun to suspect that my underlying motives for not registering were getting a little shaky. Not being registered was beginning to feel like an end in itself, which put me in the same kettle with people who see voting as a form of secular churchgoing: if you do it, you're saved; if you don't, you're damned. I've also become involved with some local political matters that may well come up at town meeting next month. Given the weaknesses of the mainstream media, gleaning trustworthy information about presidential candidates is hard. About local issues, however, first- and secondhand information is not hard to come by. Couldn't weasel out of this one. I bit the bullet: I registered to vote.

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