How else could you explain their low level  of information.  And by comparison, righties have a low level of information and have really been sold a bill of goods by a liar who won't answer questions.

Sympathy for the Undecided
By ROSS CONSERVATIVE ROBOT DOUTHAT

IN public, the American political class makes idols of undecided voters. We put them in focus groups, we let them pose questions during debates, we interview them and pitch ads to them and fold them into elaborate theories about “soccer moms” and “Reagan Democrats.” Officially, their existence justifies everything that pundits and pollsters and consultants get paid to say and do.

In private, though — and, O.K., sometimes publicly as well — political insiders tend to discuss undecideds with a mix of exasperation, condescension and contempt. Especially at this point in the presidential season, after months of debates and ads and op-eds have made the case that “the choice is clear” in “the most important election of our lifetimes,” it can be hard to imagine how anyone with an ounce of savvy can still be on the fence.

Some of this frustration is justified. As anyone who’s watched a cable-news focus group can attest, many undecided voters do tend to be ill-informed bandwagon jumpers with little coherence or consistency to their worldview.

If you live and breathe politics, chances are that you care deeply about a particular issue — abortion or the environment, foreign policy or health care. But when the liberal writer Chris Hayes, now an MSNBC host, canvassed undecided voters for John Kerry in 2004, he noticed that “more often than not, when I asked ... what issues they would pay attention to as they made up their minds, I was met with a blank stare, as if I’d just asked them to name their favorite prime number.”

As we enter this campaign’s last two weeks, though, it’s worth putting in a sympathetic word for a rarer species: the highly informed, highly engaged, yet still conflicted voter.

Whatever partisans on both sides may insist, there are good reasons that a high-information voter with views somewhere near the American median might still regard this November’s decision as a harder-than-average call.

That’s because on one of the biggest issues the campaigns are arguing about — the question of how to bring our spending in line with our revenues — the median voter is probably pretty happy with the status quo. Conservatives think we tax too much and liberals think we spend too little, but the present combination of relatively low middle-class taxes and relatively generous entitlement spending is one that most Americans would happily maintain in perpetuity.

Unfortunately, the status quo can’t actually continue: the combination of the baby boomers’ retirement and rising health care costs means something has to give. But to a voter who doesn’t bring strong ideological priors to the table, neither party’s vision for how to manage this transition probably looks like a sure bet.

The White House is arguing that we can limit health care spending largely by bureaucratic fiat, by empowering experts to change the way doctors and hospitals spend and treat and charge. But we’ve tried variations on centralized cost control for years — “Medicare Whac-A-Mole,” Reason magazine’s Peter Suderman has called it — without reaping anything like the promised benefits.

The Republicans are arguing for a more competition-driven approach, which would allow private insurers to compete for Medicare dollars, and hopefully bid down the cost of coverage. There are studies and pilot programs that suggest this kind of structural change might lower costs. But there isn’t a large-scale example that conservatives can point to as the template for the United States to follow. For a voter with a skeptic’s eye rather than a believer’s faith, the Romney-Ryan plan could easily seem like a leap in the dark.

That same skeptic’s eye would also tell our hypothetical undecided that neither side is being entirely honest about the costs of its approach. The Democrats are pretending that taxing the rich can pay for almost everything. The Republicans are pretending that neither today’s taxpayers nor today’s seniors need bear any of the burden. The high-information swing voters are basically left to decide which dishonesty is worse, and which unacknowledged cuts or tax hikes they’d rather risk having to bear.

Finally, the more our hypothetical voter knows about how Washington works, the more obvious it becomes that all of this will be hashed out over years of negotiated back-and-forth — because no legislation passed with a razor-thin majority can endure unchanged for decades, and any enduring settlement will have to leave both sides a little unsatisfied.

If you want to think well of swing voters, and imagine them as wise Athenians rather than a Colosseum-going mob, you could see the improving odds for what once seemed like an unlikely 2012 outcome — a Romney victory in which Democrats hold the Senate — as a nod to the necessity for bipartisanship, and an attempt to make a significant change in Washington while also forcing both parties back to the negotiating table.

And if you want to go on thinking poorly of the undecideds — well, I’m sure that some of the post-debate focus groups this week can help with that.





-- Modified on 10/21/2012 9:39:06 PM