"We Are Not As Divided As Our Campaigns Suggest" or "Political Degradation in My Country"

So today I'm roaming the interwebs in search of a nice quote from Barack Obama to put as my political views on Facebook. My religious views are a quote from CS Lewis, so I thought it appropriate. As I'm trolling around and looking for words like hope and believe, I reach the bottom on the page and I see this:



SERIOUSLY? The fact that political campaigning has even gotten to this level of pandering is just outrageous. How stupid, exactly, do campaign managers believe Americans to be? I am genuinely offended by this, assuming that I will see Ahmadinejad and think, "Well, he kills people for fun and hates Jews, and Obama wants to give him cookies! Obama is just a Muslim-loving Communist Terrorist!" No thank you McCain, how about you assume I'm a little better than that. What makes me the most afraid and the saddest is that I know that there are people out there, looking to do research on a candidate, the minimal research requires of course, only to run into this ad looking just like the sort of advertisements for free Ipod deals and whether or not Lindsay Lohan's books are real. And they believe it, because they watch Fox news and they are victims of poor education or mercury in the water or whatever it is that made them such idiots and they think exactly the joke that I made up there. But they really, really believe it.

And it isn't about whether or not Obama is better than McCain, or who you should vote for, I won't tell you that. What I believe is that things like this distract from issues, and no one cares the differences between candidates economic ideas, healthcare plans, foreign policies, educational reform, unemployment rates or soldier strategies. No, we want a fast-food campaign, we want something bite-size. We want clips and blurbs and something that's dumbed down. I want to pick my candidate based on a 5-minute scan across a Google Search and a YouTube video. People just don't care anymore. They want it easy, they want it fed to them, and they want it in color, deep-fried, and with blinking lights.

Tactics like this prey on the type of people who are easily influenced and who don't care enough to educate themselves and John McCain's camp knows it. He is insulting us. Accuse Obama of being elitist? He's not elitist, he's just assuming that our IQ's are higher than our shoe sizes. He is treating us like adults and he gets marked as arrogant, while McCain treats us like imbeciles and gets called "our kinda guy." I'm ashamed that we want to be that kind of guy. I'm ashamed that we view intelligence as something that divides us, that because Obama is an eloquent man he doesn't understand the plight of the underlings. Why do we think ourselves underlings, anyway? Obama is not telling you that you're stupid, he is telling you to stop telling yourself that you are.

McCain, you are a better man than this, I know that. I don't want you to be president, but I know that you are a better man than that.

And WE are better than this, America, come on. We are better than this.

With Indignation,
Genevieve