Were you under the impression that it did?

Exit polls suggest that people were voting based on "values", that somehow the undefinable "morality" of the candidate was more important to them than the fact that they were participating in a pivotal policy-making decision. These polls suggest that, to many voters, the church that the candidate attends is more important to them than the candidate's political qualifications. To these voters, it appears that the Iraq military action either does not count when evaluating the candidate's values -- as if it is a wholly separate event, external to the person being evaluated and exempt from critique -- or, even stranger, that it was a moral action. There is a fundamental disconnect in the mind of the American voter, or at least in the minds of that large block of evangelicals who turned out to vote yesterday, and ensured George W. Bush a popular vote victory. (The electoral vote is technical and binding, but the popular vote is more interesting.) I registered with Voter Call and called ten people in Ohio on Monday night. I mostly left messages with answering machines, but I did talk to a few people. Voter Call is a non-partisan get-out-the-vote thing, so I was just encouraging registered voters to actually go vote. It was fascinating to set aside my crippling cynicism for an hour and be an advocate for the thing I have absolutely no faith in: representative democracy. One woman said she wasn't planning on voting and when I asked her why, she said, "Well, cause I'm undecided." Undecided. The day before the election, and she's undecided. She registered to vote, but she's undecided. What possible good could it do for this woman to go vote? If she did, she would most likely enter the voting booth undecided, which would mean that, when it came time to vote for president, she would most likely flip a coin, albeit perhaps not a literal one. Her franchise would be executed based not on reason and value and a thorough weighing of the issues at hand, but on a coin flip. This is why democracy doesn't work. The choice between a decent, basically honest, clear-headed, thoughtful man who has proven his conviction and proven his ability to think through issues and arrive at rational conclusions, and a borderline fascist demagogue of demonstrable unqualification is too much for a lot of people. And so, with my dead horse sufficiently beaten, I cross-reference the Louis Menand article, and I'm done.