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October 17, 2004
Undecided Voter Impression
Had an interesting conversation with my daughter yesterday about the upcoming election. She's pretty typical I think of the 18-29 demographic, doesn't really follow politics all that much....but she's decided to vote this year and is trying to find out about the candidates. She said she hadn't decided for whom she would vote in the presidential race, but didn't think she could vote for Kerry.
Why?
Because, she said, she didn't believe she could trust anything that Kerry said. Her impression of him is that he says whatever's popular with the group to whom he's speaking....but he doesn't really mean any of it. Plus, she said, his statements about Cheney's daughter were wrong and unfair.
Then there is the issue of Iraq. She thinks it's wrong to pull out of Iraq too soon. As she put it "What will we say to all the mothers whose sons were killed? That they died for nothing? That we started something and now aren't going to finish it?"
I pointed out that it was also wrong to desert the people of Iraq at this point, wrong to leave without making sure they had the tools to keep the freedom that they now have.
She agreed and mentioned that she'd been talking to a co-worker who had just come back from serving in Iraq. He'd told her that most of what the media had been showing wasn't the whole picture, that for example they weren't showing all the schools that had been built, and all the things that we were doing for the kids in Iraq....in other words, the media was only showing the bad and ignoring the good news. She'd thought about it, and decided that he was right because all she ever saw in the news was about bombings and people getting killed. There was never any good news about Iraq.
If she's typical of her age group, and I think she's a fairly typical kid, that's bad news for Kerry.
No one likes a pusillanimous prevaricator.
Posted by Rita at October 17, 2004 08:40 AM
Comments
Smart young woman. We could use a bunch like her in Jersey. Many of us in this part of the state actually breathed 9-11 smoke, and yet it still appears to be a Blue State. [sigh]
Posted by: Jim at October 19, 2004 06:29 PM