I’ve noticed something good about the current presidential campaign, and I’ll tell you what it is. I think you’d like to hear anything that could possibly be good about the neverending quest for power.
The voters don’t care about the candidates’ positions. They don’t care at all.
I know that sounds like a bad thing. But it isn’t. The voters don’t care about the candidates’ positions, economic plans, moral perspectives, or whatever, because they don’t take them seriously. They don’t think the candidates are wizards, possessed of mystic insight and supernatural power. In most cases, they don’t even think they’re telling the truth.
This is a big advance over the credulous shouting and swooning that ordinarily greets at least one of the presidential candidates. I imagine there’s not a person in the world today who actually believes that Barack Obama is telling the truth. This is a big advance over 2008, and I give Obama a lot of credit for sapping the credibility of political utterances in general. It’s a healthy trend.
Voters don’t think the candidates are wizards, possessed of mystic insight and supernatural power. In most cases, they don’t even think they’re telling the truth.
You may object that some people actually like a few of the candidates, the few being Trump and Carson. This is true, but it’s not the idolatry given to the Kennedys, or to Reagan, or to the former Obama. People like Carson in the way in which they like a favorite uncle — his ideas may be a little weird, but you love him anyway; who cares about the “ideas”? That doesn’t mean you’d give your last penny to him, either. People like Trump in the way in which they like a favorite performer, which in fact he is. He’s more of a person than, say, Hillary Clinton (who isn’t a person at all). Probably he could do the job, no matter what he “thinks.”
That’s what they think. It may be shallow, but I say, thank God for shallowness. Idolatry has never done us any good, nor has a credulous belief in somebody’s “plan of action.”
