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February 09, 2004
Is Bush Reelectable? (PT 2)
My GF says that my last post on this topic was a bit incoherent. I don't doubt that at all. Mid-terms are upon me, so between Latin and early church history, I haven't had much time for writing these days. Anyway...
Abraham Maslow once came up with a psychological theory involving a hierarchy of needs. Basically there are 5 levels of questions (level one: "Do I have air/food/water", Level two: "I am safe" Level three: does anyone love me?" etc Better explained over here) Voters too, have levels of needs...
The thing is, the questions keep shifting, and if a candidate gets them out of order or answers the wrong way to the most basic question, he's not gonna be elected. The basic question of the 1992 election, for instance was: Should America be a Hegemonic nation. Bush and Clinton answered Yes, Perot answered No. Perot scored roughly 19% of the vote...
(On a frightening note, the central question of the last French Presidential election seems to have been "do you want to be a fascist, with Le Pen's "yes" coming in at 20%, or roughly 1 out of every 5 voters.)
In 1992, the second-level question was "do you like where the economy is?" Clinton won that one, and the election...
By the time of the 1996 election, the questions were all the same (with Perot's Anti-Hegemony vote capturing a mere 9% of the electorate), with "do you like Clinton" being inserted between the first and second levels. Clinton won handily...
In the year 2000, Ralph Nadar really, Really wanted the question to be "should America be a Hegemonic nation", but only 3% of the population even cared about this, with only about 1.5% actually voting on his platform. Everyone else voted for "do you like Clinton?" as a primary...
The secondary question seemed to have an attitude that history was, indeed, over, and that we Americans had won. Therefore, the question would be "how much do you wanna party?" Bush said "quite a bit", and Gore said "yes, certainly". "yes, certainly" won, though not by enough to count. It should be noted here mean old Ralph Nadar choose wrongly on this question too...
The question for this election is "Do you feel safe?" Right now, Republicans have developed their whole campaign around answering this question. ("no, but just 4 more years of Bush and I will"). Democrats have been saying "Social Security". If the Democrats don't fix this problem, they will not have a chance...
Let's not make a mistake on this score: Question 1 is "do you feel safe?", not "do you like Bush?" Democrats don't seem to understand this at all...
Iraq, BTW, doesn't seem enter into it as an issue on its own. It only seems to matter if taken in a total-security context.
Let's make no bones about this: Bush has had 4 years to make us safer. If he has failed to do so, and Americans are serious about security, then there should not be another 4 years. But first the Democratic Party has to run someone who takes this issue as seriously as America does.
Posted by Andrew at February 9, 2004 09:45 PM
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