Not A Good Time To Be Running For President
Although I can’t really think of a GOOD time to be running for President, it’s safe to look around right now and say “it ain’t now.”
According to an AP-Yahoo! News poll conducted at the beginning of October, Americans are very much not happy with the way the country is going, and it’s difficult to see how that will change in the next two weeks. Some of the numbers (emphasis mine on the bits that I find particularly distressing):
- Though about one-third worry about financing a child’s college education, six in 10 people under age 45 are anxious about it.
- 53 percent worry they will have to work longer because their retirement savings have dwindled, and 66 percent of people in their 40s feel that way.
- One-third worry about losing their job, but nearly half in their 30s and 40s do.
- Forty-six percent of whites and 62 percent of blacks worry about making mortgage and credit card payments.
- Sixty-six percent overall are concerned about facing major medical bills, including 78 percent of unmarried women.
Public approval of both President Bush and Congress has followed the downward spiral of financial markets, the survey showed.
The poll found that 25 percent said they approved of the way Bush was handling his presidency, down from 32 percent in August. Remarkably, just 3 percent said they strongly approve of the job Bush is doing, compared with 51 percent strongly disapproving.
Just 11 percent said they approved of the job Congress is doing, while virtually no one gave lawmakers strong approval.
Alrighty, so we have two candidates from an institution that nobody really likes all that much, one of whom will replace someone that half of Americans think is really stinking up the joint. Pretty low bar we set for our elected officials, isn’t it?
I’m often reminded of the late, great Douglas Adams when I read the news. If you’re not familiar with him, he is the brilliant mind behind The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. If you’ve only seen the film, it’s not horrid but ultimately has nothing on the book, or on its sequels. Anyhoo, there’s a bit about politics that seems particularly apt for now and every election season. It’s actually from So Long, And Thanks For All The Fish, the fourth book in the series.
To give you a little setup, after sharing many adventures, the two main characters in the series end up separating for a bit. Arthur, a hapless human who escapes Earth just before it is blown up to build an interstellar bypass, has found his way back to live a relatively quiet life (albeit one in which he has learned to fly without wings) on his home planet, after it was rebuilt by some mice on a mission. Ford, Arthur’s extraterrestrial friend who originally saved him from being blown up, disappears for a bit and gets himself into more trouble, but eventually comes back to Earth as a stowaway on a space ship piloted by robots …
A hatchway opened, crashed down through the Harrods Food Halls, demolished Harvey Nicholls, and with a final grinding scream of tortured architecture, toppled the Sheraton Park Tower.
After a long, heart-stopping moment of internal crashes and grumbles of rending machinery, there marched from it, down the ramp, an immense silver robot, a hundred feet tall.
It held up a hand.
“I come in peace,” it said, adding after a long moment of further grinding, “take me to your Lizard.”
Ford Prefect, of course, had an explanation for this, as he sat with Arthur and watched the non-stop frenetic news reports on the television, none of which had anything to say other than to record that the thing had done this amount of damage which was valued at that amount of billions of pounds and had killed this totally other number of people, and then say it again, because the robot was doing nothing more than standing there, swaying very slightly, and emitting short incomprehensible error messages.
“It comes from a very ancient democracy, you see …”
“You mean, it comes from a world of lizards?”
“No,” said Ford, who by this time was a little more rational and coherent than he had been, having finally had the coffee forced down him, “nothing so simple. Nothing anything like so straightforward. On its world, the people are people. The leaders are lizards. The people hate the lizards and the lizards rule the people.”
“Odd,” said Arthur, “I thought you said it was a democracy.”
“I did,” said Ford. “It is.”
“So,” said Arthur, hoping he wasn’t sounding ridiculously obtuse, “why don’t people get rid of the lizards?”
“It honestly doesn’t occur to them,” said Ford. “They’ve all got the vote, so they all pretty much assume that the government they’ve voted in more or less approximates to the government they want.”
“You mean they actually vote for the lizards?”
“Oh yes,” said Ford with a shrug, “of course.”
“But,” said Arthur, going for the big one again, “why?”
“Because if they didn’t vote for a lizard,” said Ford, “the wrong lizard might get in.”
Pretty much sums it up, don’t you think?
