Redstate

My cognitive is still dissonating.

By Robert A. Hahn Posted in 2006 — Comments (21) / Email this page » / Leave a comment »

It was my displeasure last evening to watch a delayed telecast of the final debate among the candidates for Governor of Florida. If you're like me you're not from Florida, so there's no reason to care who these gentlemen are. Suffice to say there was a Republican, a Democrat, and a guy from the Reform Party who was running as a Disgruntled Republican. The moderator was the hardballing Chris Matthews, who has apparently discovered a loophole through which he can now appear on C-SPAN so as to get some actual ratings for a change.

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Have you ever watched adult humans talk, while getting the sense that their heads should be exploding? But they aren't? That's what watching this debate was like. There were three separate issues on which Florida voters were asked to accept a Verbal Nostrum™ from one or more of these televised politicians, which nostrum could not possibly exist in this Universe. These were:

• Improving Education
  Here we were told that to improve education, we must stop all this testing that the teachers hate, while simultaneously holding teachers accountable for their results.




• Election Integrity
  Here the solution is to have a paper trail which leaves no record of how anyone voted. In fairness, the Republican candidate did not try to sell this crock. But the other two candidates did. Pressed repeatedly by Matthews to explain how one could simultaneously give each voter a Paper Trail™ recording their vote, without leaving little receipts everywhere telling how people voted, both of these allegedly sane candidates invoked the magic word Paper Trail over and over again, while insisting that no record should ever be produced indicating how anyone voted.




• Fiscal Legerdemain
  Nothing really new here, just the usual promises to cut taxes while leaving no child behind and not raising taxes anywhere else and not cutting any benefits you are getting sleepy.

Seriously: here were the actual candidates for a serious office with substantial responsibility and billions of dollars in budgetary authority, and all of them were promising voters existential paradoxes from an alternate Universe instead of even a partial solution to real-world problems. Yikes.

Great Nixon's Ghost

I'd forgotten about this when Kerry did it, but the Democratic candidate did this so many times last night that Richard Nixon himself appeared in my room to rattle his chains and say, "I am the Ghost of the Secret Plan." Those old enough to remember this know that in 1968, Richard Nixon ran on the platform of having "a plan" to end the war in Vietnam. If pressed to say what the plan was, he'd claim that to reveal it would be to wreck it. Believe it or not, this worked. Nixon won the election.

Last night, no matter what the issue was, the Democratic candidate in this race began his response with, "I have a plan." To his credit, Chris Matthews was having none of this. He tried numerous times to pin this guy down on even one item of specificity concerning any of these plans. But it was not to be. This candidate was a slogan machine, and slogans were all anyone was going to get out of him.

This is not to say that the Republican, or even the Reform Party candidate, was any better. The whole debate was a depressing exercise in watching supposedly intelligent human beings trying to bamboozle what they all assumed to be an ignorant electorate into buying Stuff And Nonsense from one or another blow-dried empty suit. Yes, it has come to this: an entire hour devoted to impossible-to-execute Secret Plans that contradict themselves. When it was over, everyone acted as though this were perfectly normal.