More Fitting Name for Swing Voters: Airheads

“There is a certain satisfaction in coming down to the lowest ground of politics, for we get rid of cant and hypocrisy.”

Poets have a knack for cutting to the heart of things. So thank you Ralph Waldo Emerson.

Down here in the loam and mud, the 2002 elections have commenced. Some Americans will roll their eyes at this reminder. Not politics, not already.

By chance, these are the very people I’m thinking about just now. Because they bear blame for the worst of what we’re about to endure.

These are the much-celebrated “swing voters.” The I-can’t-stand-politics voters. They believe themselves above the fray. They vote “the man, not the party,” if they vote at all. They are independent thinkers, which often means they pick their politicians the way they pick their toilet tissue--by the sway of advertising. They think of themselves as common-sense patriots.

For the most part, though, they are just airheads.

I can get away with name-calling because the people I have in mind don’t read this page in the newspaper. It would sully them. Besides, it would require concentration.

Pollsters spend millions of dollars chasing these voters to learn that they favor so-and-so because, well, he/she “kinda seems more, ah, real,” or some other half-baked cliche. This information is fed into the formulaic machinery of political advertising to produce snake-oil pitches designed to reinforce suspicions that so-and-so’s opponent “is more, ah, unreal.”

Thus, conservatives kicked off the campaign season in South Dakota with an ad showing home state Sen. Tom Daschle side by side with Saddam Hussein. The Democratic leader of the U.S. Senate, you see, is helping his friend hold power in Iraq. That’s because Daschle didn’t vote to open a wildlife refuge in Alaska to oil drilling.

This is not an ad designed for thinking people. This is not politics for the committed or even the casually interested. This is politics for the airhead.

Honey, get this: Daschle wants to save the caribou for Saddam!

I’m not intending to show favoritism. The Democrats will soon be doing their version of the same, if they aren’t already. Because the airhead, of course, is an unaffiliated voter--wholly up for grabs, easily scared and generally angry in the way that schoolchildren are furious at the world when they forget their homework.

It’s Speaker Hastert’s fault!

There is not much we can do about the airheads. Except one thing: We can quit glorifying them.

For years now, our political culture has not only endured but exalted airheadedness. Close elections hinge on their votes. So everyone wants to cozy up and find out what’s on their minds, no matter how vain and airheaded. Politicians and journalists genuflect in homage to their power.

Other voters have the good sense to understand the stakes in politics and require little persuasion. So the lion’s share of campaign energy is directed at these people with no good sense at all. In the end, the most celebrated voter in our democracy is the airhead who prances into the ballot box still professing to be “uncommitted” until he/she/it closes his/her/its eyes and jabs the old butterfly ballot, randomly.

Those many ballots over-voted in Florida? Airheads.

Bush. Gore. Good, simple names. Gave ‘em each a vote.

News reports take seriously the airheads’ farfetched statements about wanting “more information” before making their choice. As if an inquiring mind couldn’t drown in information with 10 minutes of effort. Another favorite bromide of the airhead is the assertion that “politicians are all alike, so it doesn’t matter.” That way, the airheads never have to learn the names of the people who represent them.

Elsewhere in our culture, airheads are marginalized. They are conspiracy theorists. They see spaceships in the night sky. Only in politics are they actually afforded respect. They want to vote for “None of the Above” as if that will get us anywhere. They don’t trust experience so they champion term limits.

This election? Well, we can’t do away with them. But we can, at least, try to shame them.

The next time someone mentions that Tom Daschle has forged an alliance with Saddam Hussein, you can have the satisfaction of saying, “My airheaded friend, were it not for the likes of you, the 2002 congressional elections could actually be about something.”