Why You Can't Seem to Agree with Polls on Who Won the Debate

[scott]

Simply put... its because you are a homer! Now, I will follow that up by saying there is absolutely nothing wrong with that.

For the past few weeks I have listened to several friends, colleagues, and complete strangers talk about how they can't believe the polls because in their eyes either Bush killed Kerry or vice versa. Not surprisingly, all of these people have already made up their mind as to who they believe will be the better president.

The fact of the matter is that you don't win a debate by impressing a bunch of people who already agree with you anyway... that is called a Pep-Rally. As one of my favorite Redneck oil company co-workers who believes Kerry will lead us into Civil War and Marshal Law puts it... "maybe I'm just biased, but I think Bush killed him in the first debate!" Well Bubba, I hate to be the one to tell you- but it is because you are biased!!! If you have already determined who you are going to vote for because one candidates ideas are more in line with yours (which is, theoretically, the way people should vote), then chances are you are going to side with that candidate when he repeats all those ideas and you hear the opposing ideas you already disagree with.

So, the NeoCons, Yonivores, NBADans, and Despurado's of the world don't determine who wins a debate... it is the undecided minority who are still contemplating, among other things, how the hell did we end up having to choose between these two morons, and which one is less of an asshat. I will be honest, I have seen very little, if any, of the debates so I don't really have an opinion of who I think has "won," but according to the polls, the undecided minority has determined Bush is king jackass for the day.

If you are a Bush supporter, does this really surprise you? Do you think people, who after 4 years of Bush are still undecided about his ability to walk and chew gum, are going to be impressed by his defensive attitude and inability to control his facial expressions? Bush reminds me of a spoiled little kid with no restraint... as soon he doesn't get his way he goes into his Adult Temper Tantrum... do you think undecided votes are impressed?

If you are a Kerry supporter, are you really surprised that your margin in the polls isn't greater? Do you think people are impressed with Kerry's inconsistency which he only highlights every time he mentions how consistant he is? Do you think they are impressed by his lifelessness?

This member of the undecided minority certainly hasn't been impressed enough to vote for either of these assclowns.

[exstatic]

The fact of the matter is that you don't win a debate by impressing a bunch of people who already agree with you anyway... that is called a Pep-Rally.

...or a Bush campaign stop.

[SpursWoman]

...or a Kerry campaign stop.


:wtf

[exstatic]

I agree with you scott, and since I live in a "Bush" state, I can indulge my third party whim, since it will not have any effect, and vote Libertarian if Badnarik makes the TX ballot. It may help them get funding next time, or something.

[IcemanCometh]

I'm voting for Scott Baio

[exstatic]

Ah, the Chachi party. :lol

[whottt]

If I shelve my objectivity and pretend I know nothing of what the candidates have said previously in this campaign...Kerry still seems full of shit and weak on the issue of foreign policy. He contradicts himself in the course of the debate multiple times. He gets a huge asswhipping on the subject every single time....

[exstatic]

"Shelving" your objectivity has never been a problem for you, whottt. :lol

[whottt]

Nor has it you....and I've never had to twist the statements of my opponents...like say...altering the statement :Tim Derk gave more to the Spurs organization from a personal standpoint than any player in Spurs history...including David Robinson...into Coyote > Drob.

Yeah you're a beacon of objectivity. Fucker.

[exstatic]

I think you like Bush because he doesn't know what is grammatically correct any more than you do.

[Hook Dem]

It really doesn't matter who won the debate. Bush will win the election.

[Nbadan]

If you are a Kerry supporter, are you really surprised that your margin in the polls isn't greater? Do you think people are impressed with Kerry's inconsistency which he only highlights every time he mentions how consistant he is? Do you think they are impressed by his lifelessness?

Nice stuff Scott. Your right in your criticizism of John Kerry he needed to be more clear on his positions much earlier, but this whole idea of Kerry being a flip-flopper has been nothing but a smear campaign by the right-wing echo chamber.

The President had a chance to make this election about Issues. The Kerry campaign has been yelling for weeks, "let's talk about the Issues", but instead the White house has made this campaign about the Swift boat liers, or RatherGate, or now, Food-for-oil-gate.

It's ridiculous that Republicans want John Kerry to outline his plan for Iraq and the war on terrorism when we don't even know what W's plan is either. Are we gonna stay in Iraq or not? For how long? What about Iran and North Korea?

In the two debates, constituents have been able to see the real differences in the two candidates without the usual political spin. John Kerry understands that the war on terrorism is going to be a complex war. A war whose success depends on Global alliances and determination on the part of the administration to get things done. A war than can be fought with diplomacy and when needed bullets. A war that will be supported by the American people, as well as our traditional allies.

W believes that everyone who didn't go along with us into Iraq is against us, and the U.S. ain't getting any help in Iraq cause the most of the Euro's hate us, and the United Nation hates us too, and has been plotting against us with Saddam.

I ask those of you who don't watch Fox News, which is more likely to be more accurate?

[Nbadan]

Here you go Scott...It will all be over soon..


It's so easy to get all caught up in the everyday spit and hiss and noise and blank presidential smirks. Isn't it?

It is, after all, incredibly easy to get stuck in the white-hot moment, all screaming elections and bland debates and counterfeit terrorism fears and ugly obesity epidemics and Atkins-approved bubble gum and air/water pollution like an afterthought, all commingling with the mad melodrama of your last bad haircut and the scratch on your precious bumper to the point where we forget the scope of it all, the scale, the macro and the micro and the ebb and flow and the imminent flip of the cosmic switch.

This is how we are wired. This is only what we see. The long view is clearly not our forte, a sense of the celestial a concept we just can't quite taste. We forget, for example, how relatively quickly regimes rise and neoconservative empires fall and populations overturn and how nearly every single human biped now alive and walking and spitting and parallel parking and consuming Big Macs and not watching ABC sitcoms on the planet today will be very much completely dead within a short 100 years, if not sooner.

Pause here. Think about that. A hundred years, everyone now alive, dead. Everyone. You. Me. Bush. Your kids. All dead. Guaranteed.

And of course you are not exempt because if you are old enough to read this and if you are old enough to make it through this paragraph without caring all that much about the general carefree lack of major punctuation or a clear thesis statement, then it is indeed proof that you are already well on your way toward some sort of Regurgitative Afterlife Leapfrog-arama, some sort of mystical evolutionary whoop, if not a ghostly dreamy moist sepia-toned afterlife featuring a plethora of nubile long-eyelashed callipygian assistants plying your luminous self with wine and chocolates and fine artisan cheeses, forevermore.

But as true as that scenario may be, on a moment-by-moment basis, we aren't much aware of what might be in store. We block, we dodge, we fill up on grease and poison and anger, and it all seems so immediate, so right now, so present and hateful and suffocating as if there has never been anything else but this, but Bush and Kerry and Saddam and Ford Expeditions like a national cancer, bad schools and staggering third-world poverty and a Dubya-ravaged planet.

And history merely seems like a blurry, unrecognizable movie and the future just a vague intangible notion, a blip, a hint, so much so you can only smell the immediacy in the air and taste the bitter metallic tang of it on your tongue and you want to spit it out and cleanse your palate on something fruity and swooning and just a little bit eternal, which is why we so desperately turn to religion, and religion can only mostly shrug and offer platitudes and guilty doctrine and blind faith and ask for money. You know how it is.

Funny, then, that the mystics and the gurus and the deep thinkers, they always tell us that true awareness, true power of self, comes from living in the now, in the moment, in the deep Yes of today, though of course we look at them and say but wait you can't possibly mean I must commit myself with full unwavering intimate intent to the war and Donny Rumsfeld's black soulless eyes and cancerous McNuggets and hissing policy wonks and Bill O'Reilly digging himself a karmic grave with every shouted sneer and Jessica Simpson's ubiquity infecting us like an STD, right?

No no no, they reply. No, of course that's not what we mean. Then they might roll their eyes and sigh and order another pitcher of mojitos.

What they mean, rather, is to sink so deeply into the hot moment of now that you can actually transcend the mad swirl of heatstroke and hate and bile and Bush and jackhammers outside your window, and learn to see through the raw everyday smoke-and-mirror shell game of blissful agony and corrupted paradise to where you can actually begin to see the eternal in it all, lick the interconnectedness, move like you know you're really just a thousand pins dancing on the head of an angel.

This is the trick, then. To live so intentionally for the wet sticky Now that you dissolve the distinctions and see that it all flows together and it's all just two (one? zero?) degrees of separation between Us and Them, Fear and Hope, War and Love and Porn and Religion and Man and Woman and Self and Divine and Will and Grace and this too shall pass and Bush is just a sad bleak phantasm we have to pass through, like a sewer pipe, a dark reeking cloud, a bad fever dream, a nasty flu you had as a child where you dreamed your hands were two balloons.

Live in the moment, pay attention, participate, delve into the issues as if your life depended on it, fight your ass off for what you believe in and what you care about and what matters most. But then again, avoid toxins, don't get poisoned by it all. Stay clear, be spiritually nimble, physically radiant, transcend at will. This is the balance. This is the flux. This is the only way.

Because soon enough, a small hunk of time will pass and this epoch will flit away and we'll blink a number of times and feel a slight shift and not remember much of it anyway. Which is why we have the Internet. And books. And "I Love the '00s." And faint wisps of memory, like threads, like smoke, like vague hints of something else.

We will very shortly all look back on this and laugh. And cry. And point fingers and lay blame and try to figure out what the hell went wrong and where we screwed it all up and what we did right and where we found our glimmers of hope and our delicious hallowed balms of much-needed temporal salvation.

Do you see? Does it make any sense at all? Are you paying sufficient attention? No?

Then come closer to the screen. No, closer. Even closer, still.

Do you see it now? See how it all begins to dissolve and soften and pixilate? To break apart into a million tiny perfect luminous dots with nothing but infinite space between and infinite potential betwixt? Well, there you go. There's your current event. There's your immeasurable now. Think about it. Now get back to work.

By Mark Morford, SF Gate Columnist (mailto:[email protected])