The Skewing of the Independent Mind

That's "skewing", not "skewering", although independent voters this year may feel there's at least sometimes more of the latter.

I got to thinking, after last Sunday night's debate that it must be hard as all get-out to be an independent these days.  Now, I don't really know what it means to call yourself an "independent" these days.  It's not "moderate" because there are no such things.  Let's say perhaps that a better term would be "undecided."

But we'll call them "independent" because it's as good a word as any to use.

And I believe that the independent voter is forced to be looking at two candidates without even using the same scale to evaluate them.  In other words, as you, as an independent, evaluate Donald Trump, you are thinking "Businessman ... made a lot of money ... employed a lot of people ... no experience; never held office ... 70 years old ... really crude mouth ... good father with great kids ... unpolished debater ... no details, just 100,000-foot attitudes ..."

You're looking at all those things and evaluating whether to vote for him based on all that and whether it is workable as a president.

Then -- you switch over to Hillary Clinton and a totally different set of attributes come to the fore.  You're thinking "Career politician ... married to governor and president ... corrupt ... senator, Cabinet official ... Clinton Foundation ... polished in debates ... caught in many lies ... email server ... would be first woman president ... Russian reset, Libya, Syria failures ... let USA sell uranium to Russia in return for donations and Bill speech fees ... policy in detail ... destroyed lives of husband's victims ..."

Do you get my point?  For almost all of these ways in which we are looking at the two candidates, we are looking at completely different attributes.  It is as if the terms "better" or "worse" are completely useless, because the way we are looking at these two candidates is on two different scales, two different sets of attributes, two different sets of issues.

Nixon and Kennedy debated in 1960 in a campaign dominated by claims to two Asian islands, Quemoy and Matsu, that we no longer remember.  But the voter could compare the way each candidate would approach the issue, and make a decision.  We have nothing like that now, because we're not getting the kind of issue-based discussion in the debates that we need.

I mean, let's face it, I was never going to vote for Hillary because she's a liberal and I'm not.  The corruption and incompetence are just poisonous icing on the cake.  I'm not an independent.  There are no issues where I would trust her leadership because I don't agree with her views in the first place.

But if you're an independent, I don't know what you do.  I just know that your scoring system is impossible, because there is so much noise obscuring the signal, for one, and because the evaluation of each candidate is on a completely different scale -- or set of scales.

So let me try to help.  Set the candidates aside, for the time being.  The current administration has doubled our debt, made the USA the butt of jokes around the world, weakened our military, over-regulated business to the point that we have the lowest labor force participation in several decades, and cares a lot more about gender-neutral bathrooms than ISIS in our backyards.

Ask yourself which candidate represents the continuation of all that.  And unless you think that is a good thing, worth another four years of it, I think you know what to do.

Scales be darned.

Copyright 2016 by Robert Sutton
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