Posted 10:05 PM by steve

It's been said that Americans end up with the government they deserve... and based on the terrific logic employed by this Northern Virginia voter during the recent race for the Democratic Party nomination for Governor, we don't deserve a lot.

Granted, I didn't vote for Terry McAuliffe either (because, being a Republican, I didn't think it right to meddle in the Democratic primary), but this lady's logic for not voting for McAuliffe is just, how do I put it, ridiculous.

She says she didn't vote for McAuliffe because, one, his campaign called her home too many times... and because she doesn't like Virginia's one-term limit for Governor which, supposedly would allow a carpetbagger (I guess she is referring to McAuliffe in this way) to use the position as a stepping-stone to a national career.

Notice she didn't say she didn't vote for McAuliffe because of his positions on the issues... and as such, there are two scenarios: (1) she doesn't care about the issues at all, and thus decides to vote on something as trivial as the number of phone calls a campaign makes, or (2) she does care about the issues, and likes McAuliffe's positions better than that of his two opponents (if she didn't, she would have said she voted against McAuliffe on that basis) but was so put out by the something else that she decided to vote against the guy whose positions she liked best.

If the former, what a dunce, deciding to vote on the basis of something as silly as the number of phone calls a candidate's campaign makes is pretty dumb. It's not as if McAuliffe himself made the phone calls, the calls were probably made pursuant to a campaign strategy designed and executed by McAullife's campaign staff.

And if the latter, what a dunce, it is pretty stupid to not vote for the guy who you agree with on the issues because of something as silly as the number of phone calls the candidate's campaign made. Did it not occur to this voter that the calls would stop once the campaign was over? And if she did agree with McAuliffe on the issues, wouldn't having the phone ring be a small price to pay for seeing her candidate win?

And the same holds true if she voted against McAuliffe - who she presumably agreed with on the issues - because of a belief that McAuliffe was going, like current Virginia Governor Tim Kaine, to check out early. First of all, Kaine ain't a carpetbagger and he has turned his attention elsewhere, so why not assue that McAuliffe's primary opponents would be just as likely to check out early? And, again presuming she liked McAuliffe's positions on the issues more than she like the other guys, wouldn't it be better to have the guy you like in office, even if he wasn't going to stick around for the full four years, than to have a guy who you don't like serving as Governor for four years?

Yeah, yeah, she got on her soapbox, she doesn't like automated phone calls and she ain't happy with Virginia limiting its Governors to one term... but there are better ways of expressing one's dissatisfaction with that than voting against the guy who shares her positions on the issues.

As I said, we get the representation we deserve. America didn't bother to check out Obama past the teleprompter speeches.. and we ended up with a President who doesn't really have too much going on in his head.