Undecided? Don't tell Quriltai

Blogging commrade Quriltai--the one on the shore--thinks Colorado will be the deciding factor in this year's Prez election. But he's not impressed with you fence-sitters. Quoted extensively below, read the entire post here.

As time goes on, I find myself more firmly believing that the final disposition of a swing state is strongly wrapped up in the instincts of its last-minute voters. And the more I contact these people, the more I read about them, the more convinced I am that undecided voters are basically morons. McCain and Obama have been running for president for 18 months, and they have very different visions of the future. Yet somehow these people haven't yet made a choice. This isn't a decision between Coke and Pepsi, it's a decision between Poland Springs and Wild Turkey.

If at this point a voter finds them of equal value, that's probably because they don't know much, or care much. The ones who don't care that much, don't vote -- so we're left with the ones who don't know that much. Christopher Hayes writes one of the best profiles of the undecided voter I've ever read...here's a snippet:

Perhaps the greatest myth about undecided voters is that they are undecided because of the "issues."...The majority of undecided voters I spoke to couldn't name a single issue that was important to them...the very concept of the issue seemed to be almost completely alien to most of the undecided voters I spoke to...As far as I could tell, the problem wasn't the word "issue"; it was a fundamental lack of understanding of what constituted the broad category of the "political."

The whole thing is worth the read, and it makes anyone who believes in a rationalist approach to politics and campaign agog. I submit that without any grounding in political reality, these last minute "decision makers" go back to instincts, gut level. I believe Bush got close enough to win thanks to undecideds in Florida and Ohio feeling that they knew someone like Bush and were comfortable with him. Whether they agreed on the issues wasn't as important -- better to avoid Kerry or Gore, who were nearly identical in broadcasting waves of privilege and remove from the working people of America.