Political bingo

Meandering musings tonight.

As it happens, I've done more research into, and reading about, the respective backgrounds of Sen. John F. Kerry and Pres. George W. Bush during the past few months than I'd done in all past presidential elections combined — and I've been voting since 1976.  I've known since at least 9/11 that I'd be voting for Dubya again this year, so I can't claim to have ever been an "undecided voter."  Of course, that's colored everything I've learned as I've learned it, and affected my selection of sources.  The pre-existing biases in my blogging are obvious to anyone who skims my sidebar or reads any two or three of my posts on politics at random.

This troubles me not at all.  I've been justly accused of many things, but being indecisive isn't one of them.  And as a trial lawyer picking juries, one of the first things I learned — long before I got my license, in fact — was that it's absolutely impossible to assemble an "unbiased jury."  The best one can ever hope for is to assemble a jury whose pre-existing biases won't blind them to the evidence, the arguments of counsel, and the court's instructions, and whose members will do their best to follow their solemn oaths to try to decide the case on the basis of those things, instead of on the basis of their biases.  This is something I've talked about during jury selection in every case I've tried over the last 24 years.  There are many apt parallels between the jury system and our system of republican representative democracy, and although I've seen both run amok on occasions, I nevertheless honor and trust in both systems.

Which brings me in round-about fashion to today's news report (about which I blogged briefly last night) of Sen. Kerry's latest credibility problems — his repeated, and now demonstratedly false, claims that he'd met with the entire U.N. Security Council before casting his vote to authorize the Iraq War. 

The report was absolutely unsurprising to me — I've long since pegged Sen. Kerry as, to put it most kindly, a compulsive serial exaggerator.  And I thought when I first heard those specific claims about meeting with the U.N. Security Council that he was almost certainly exaggerating them then.  As it happens, my own vote had already been cast in early balloting before this story broke, but it would have had absolutely no impact on my decision-making process; in my judgment, that cake already has an 8-foot-thick layer of icing on it.

Whether they've spent hours reading candidates' biographies and news accounts, their websites and their military records, their speeches and their campaign papers and their debates — or not — by now most American voters, or prospective voters, have likewise probably long since made up their minds about this election.  A few minds that were previously "made up" have probably changed during the last few weeks; quite a few minds that were undecided have certainly dropped out of that category and landed on one side of the fence or the other.  So how big a deal can a story like this one be?

The answer came to me this morning in the shower, and the answer is:  Bingo!

Metaphorically speaking, we each of us construct tables or matrices whose entries are bits of information, with plus or minus variables, about candidates and campaign issues.  A single issue voter — one who is so adamantly "pro-choice" or "pro-life," for example, that a candidate's position on abortion trumps all other concerns — has a 1x1 matrix.  But most of us have larger matrices, of varying sizes, with the data points given varying weights in the mental spreadsheet that cranks through them and produces an ultimate voting decision.  And patterns in those matrices matter, just like the mathematical formulae that can be defined for different cells in computer spreadsheets.

For some number of undecided voters, or wavering voters, the breaking news story that Sen. Kerry repeatedly exaggerated his claim to have met with U.N. Security Council representatives (including the German ones — Germany not being a permanent member, nor for some time even a temporary member) — will fill in a previously empty space.  And, hypothetically, reading across that row of data points, or down the column, or diagonally or whatever, some number of voters will say to themselves: 

Christmas in Cambodia ... 1st Purple Heart ... American soldiers committing atrocities as "not isolated incidents but crimes committed on a day-to-day basis with the full awareness of officers at all levels of command" ... in Safwan when the Gulf War ceasefire was signed ... met with all the members of the U.N. Security Council before Iraq War — BINGO!

That's the point at which they'll have completed a row or a column in their mental table and have then concluded, "Yup, what this man says can't be trusted."

Is the U.N. Securitiy Council story a "Bingo moment" for very many voters?  I don't know.  Every voter not only sets up, but scores, his or her own bingo card, and they all look different.  But my guess is that for some percentage of the undecided or swayable voters, it was or will be.  And even if it's not, it's another data point — another square filled in — on their cards.

I called "Bingo!" months ago, and cast my vote accordingly two nights ago.  Now, like the rest of America, I'm just waiting to see the results of the big contest.