Snip:
Why do I hate electability? Well, let me count the ways. First, it drives me insane - I mean, more insane than usual - to watch the pundits and talking heads discuss 'electability' as if it is an essential asset that a candidate either is born with or isn't, when they must know perfectly well that they are the ones who create it.
Second, the obsession with 'electability' short-circuits discussions of the issues by trapping the entire debate inside the repeating loop of a maddeningly self-fulfilling prophecy. Because of course if enough people believe a candidate is not electable, then they won't vote for that candidate, and consequently that candidate will become unelectable. What we won't ever know is whether that candidate could have been electable - indeed, elected - if instead of trying to pick a winner, people just picked the person who they actually wanted to have running the country.
'Electability' does not reside in a candidate's hairstyle, biography, accent, or platform; it is an airy nothing formed of pure perception which then becomes incarnated in reality because no matter how much we may criticize the national media we are all still their creatures. How else do we come by our perception of what the rest of our fellow-Americans want? We can't run our own polls; we can't call up people from Missoula to Miami and ask what they really want; we don't know from statistical sampling. It's the media, not the American people, who manufacture this national consensus that determines 'electability.'
Third, obsessing over electability brings out the worst in us. Out on the playground we were all taught, often brutally, that there is a high price to pay for going against the majority. We were also taught that in a conflict, the safe thing to do is to follow the strongest. Voting 'electability' is a concession to that logic: it's an admission that what you want above all is to be on the winning side, which in our system is (or at least is supposed to be) the side with the most people. Take that logic far enough, and eventually you don't have a democracy; you have a quiescent populace accepting the rule of a small group of powerful men because they know that most of their fellow-Americans will do the same.
Read the whole thing here:
http://www.democraticunderground.com/plaidder/04/10.html
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