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It comes hard to admit this, but I found myself in total agreement with George Bush at one point Thursday night.
Before the debate began, though, I wanted to let a
machine do some of my work. During the vice-presidential
debate, I almost lost track of how many times Dan Quayle
said This really goes back to my qualifications, and on
a daily basis I have dealt with the three major issues
facing....
I didn't want to lose count of something important
again. I installed a voice-pattern recognition system on my
computer, so the computer could count how many times Mike
Dukakis used the phrase make the tough decisions.
I'd like to give you the precise number, but unfortunately,
the poor machine began to smoke at the moment that its
monitor displayed a numeric overflow
message. It
just wasn't built to handle numbers that big.
Back to the drawing board on that one. As I watched, I got impression that if Bush wins, a federal narcotics agent will be attached to each household, whereas if Dukakis wins, an Internal Revenue Service field-enforcement auditor will be assigned to every enterprise.
We have two candidates before us, each one claiming that he deserves our trust. But neither appears to trust us all that much. One seems certain that we'll all go on long drug binges if we're left to run our own lives without increased federal supervision. The other seems to believe that American business owners haven't already developed enough fear and dread of the IRS. Hasn't anyone told them that trust goes both ways or it doesn't work at all?
Anyway, Bush complained about campaign coverage. Candidates always complain about coverage, but the vice-president is dead right this time.
He noted that they issue position paper after position paper about issues. He said he spent a day in the Midwest, discussing agricultural policy at stop after stop. Most of that never reaches the public, though. All that ever makes the evening news or the morning front page is a witty attack line, or the results of the latest poll.
This media fascination with polls means that every election is being covered as if it were a horse race, and that the only thing that you or I might possibly be interested in is knowing which way to bet.
Are you really all that interested in knowing who's ahead at the moment? When that changes all the time? When it depends on how the questions are phrased and who's conducting the survey and for what purpose? When polls had Alf Landon by a landslide in 1936 and Thomas Dewey all but elected in 1948?
I'm not that interested, either. If I wanted to know who's going to win on Nov. 8, I'd consult a tea-leaf reader.
The task before each of us is not to judge the odds, but to determine how to cast our own ballots.
I know all about the Dukakis surge after the Democratic convention, and how Bush sagged in the polls momentarily after the Quayle selection, and how it was neck and neck just before the debate Thursday, with Bush apparently ahead in the electoral count and coming on strong in California, our most populous state, although Dukakis was sending in more campaign workers to protect what appeared to be a slight lead there.
But I still don't have any idea whether our national finances would do better under the Bush flexible freeze or the Dukakis tough decisions. I seriously doubt that either man favors letting murderers ply their trade, or believes that sleazy influence-peddlers should play a major role in government, although I don't yet know how either would handle such problems on a day-to-day basis. Neither man wants us and our children to breath foul air or drink tainted water, but I don't know which offers better solutions.
All we ever know is who's winning at the moment. Thanks to this horse-race style of campaign coverage, we also know who the losers are -- you and I, and about 100 million other voters.
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