I had a conversation yesterday with a good friend of mine, who happens to think about as strategically as anyone I know. We were having a wide-ranging political conversation, one in which he informed me that the folks back home had come to be more engaged in the Presidential Election as a result of Mitt Romney's more aggressive stances vis-a-vis The President in the past few days. After a while, we started to talk about the VP slot, and I asked him who he wanted--not who he thought it would be.
Think of that...free from fear of a Conservative backlash, Romney can choose a running mate tailor made to attract voters to the ticket. As I recounted last week, two women close to me in the past few weeks--both of whom were Obama voters--told me that if Romney picked Rice, they would vote for him--without consideration of any other matter.
Rice could be a powerful force in this election, no doubt about it.
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I like Dr Rice a great deal but I am taken with your friend's two lady friends who would switch their political allegiance apparently due to little more than how the GoP's VP candidate is plumbed.
Lacking any semblance of scientific evidence to support my theory, I nonetheless believe that the people we tend to credit with deciding the elections-- the uncommitted middle--are in large part the same ones who are enamored with the lives of the Hollywood elite. So devoid are they of personal fulfillment in their lives that they latch onto far more interesting (they believe) lives of the Pitt-Jolies and (I hate that I even know this term) Tom-Kats and create this imaginary close kinship with these purveyors of make believe. Often, they vote for the more hip candidate (Clinton, Obama) unless the one who is from the more hip party just isn't even remotely hip (Gore, Kerry). Then, and only then might they seek out some bit of information, hopefully from a thoughtful and informed friend or relative, and vote based at least on a sliver of substance of which they've become informed. Of course, these ladies did not vote for plumbing when Sarah Palin was VP candidate. Is it because "the first sort of main stream African American, who's articulate and bright and clean" who also had rockstar hipness according to the tabloids (NY Times, WaPost, etc) made plumbing a secondary concern? I think so. That, along with their apparent need to use their vote as some sort of personal absolution for our history of slavery. What is clear to me now is that the hipness has worn thin--when it comes to what he is trying to do to this country and they way he has gone about it, he's more gangsta than hip. And for once in his life, he has a public record that even Journolist can't obscure from the public. So if my theory is correct AND the swaying masses of the middle uncommitted indeed view the incumbent One as decidedly less hip, then I am thankful they might easily be swayed by slivers of substance or even plumbing. .
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