Column: Which Clown Do I Vote For?
Listen: Given the option of electing a Harvard law professor or a glass-eating clown, vote for the clown.
Pop the bulb, and feed pieces to candidates. Vote for those who will eat the glass.
For the average citizen, the voting conundrum is born of finite time and imperfect information: You don’t have the time or resources to actually meet and research each candidate yourself, and thus must rely on second-hand research of dubious provenance. ["Uncle Ted says the incumbent's mother was a half-goat demi-god from beyond the stars!"]
The traditional solution is a voter guide: Your local paper, or community-of-faith, or pregnancy-termination-opinion-group, or storefront outpost of a deep-pocked national political action committee, or unqualified demagogue runs off a tidy little list of who you should vote for, occasionally offering highly abridged bulleted summaries of why those candidates are Right for You, and how the other guys are Basically a Bunch of Crooked Fools.
It doesn’t take much cynicism to see a voter guide is little more than a marketing piece that a special interest group publishes to magnify its vote by reproducing its opinions in many concerned, trusting citizens. Viewed with properly jaundiced eyes, it begins to seem like an electorate that is well-informed only by voter guides is worse than one that isn’t really all that well-informed at all.
As such, you may be better off relying on a heuristic of your own making. My preferred rule of thumb is this: Always vote for the glass-eating clown. [Full Story]