I can often come across as disparaging of the average American, and their decision making process. And I am frustrated by it. But I do realize that it’s not wholly their fault. Americans are busy, they’re tired, and they simply don’t have the time to pay attention the way it’s needed.
Productivity increases occur year after year. Every new technology creates a new efficiency. My primary job over the last decade and more was in process improvement. My job was to increase efficiencies, both through human and technological processes, with reasonable but not barricading checkpoints to ensure a greater output. In short, my job was to increase productivity in the workplace.
What about increasing productivity in our lives? Where does that come from?
Over the weekend Sarah Palin tried to explain the wardrobe malfunction. The problem is, for those of us long opposed to her and to independent undecideds, it’s just not good enough. It’s not the clothes, stupid. It’s the disingenuousness that is Sarah Palin. She no more said thanks but no thanks to a $150,000 wardrobe than she said thanks but no thanks to the bridge to nowhere. She said bring it on until it became unpopular and then kept the money anyway. She isn’t against earmarks, she requested more per capita than Obama ever did. The problem isn’t her clothes, it’s her shallowness. She’s like the kid caught with the cookie crumbs all over her, but still refuses to admit she raided the cookie jar.
Everything about this woman seems perfect until you scratch the surface. That’s the problem with the clothes. Not that she has them, but that she wasn’t honest about them. If her consignment shop clothes are good enough for her now, why did she ever jettison them in the first place? I’m sympathetic, as I wrote here, about her need for the clothes. What I have a problem with is how it’s approached. She allowed herself to be packaged and when it didn’t work, she blames the gift wrapping. If she’s such a maverick and willing to take on her own party, why would she cave so completely on something as simple as a wardrobe?
Nordstrom, Saks, Neiman’s, etc. all put these big tags on the more expensive clothes so that people can’t wear them once then return them. Now the campaign is claiming some or most of them have been returned. Remove the tag and you can’t return the item. Returning them after they’ve been worn is tantamount to shoplifting.
The Republican Party has underestimated the power of Internet communications. They are campaigning as if blogs, YouTube, Google News, and The Daily Show didn’t exist. And it’s biting them. Just like the bridge lie, this is the clothing lie (not to mention the science lie, provided to me by a former classmate who I won’t name because I don’t have his permission). And all of them could have been easily avoided.
Wouldn’t this have been better? “I listened to the people and once they made clear we didn’t want that bridge to nowhere I instead put the money towards more worthwhile projects. I hate earmarks but had to work with the system as it stood because that was the only way to get what was needed to get done. Knowing how broken the system is, I’m in a strong position to change it. See here, here, and there where I made change where I could. Now put me in a better position to make change where it matters.”
Or this: “The clothes? You’re seriously talking about my clothes? Of course I needed new clothes. Didn’t you see what happened to Hillary in the primaries where Glamour and People and all kinds of fashion magazines picked her apart? Didn’t she herself say, near tears, that she needed a lot of help (referring to hair dressers, stylists, and makeup artists) to get through each day? It’s tough to be a woman in politics. Hillary knows what I’m talking about. Yeah, they bought me clothes and yeah, I’m going to pay the taxes on them. Nothing’s free and no one knows that better than women trying to crack that glass ceiling.”
And with the science lie, she once again proves her shallowness in thinking the American people will laugh at the concept of studying the fruit fly without really understanding what that science gains, for all of us.
The list just goes on. But it takes too much time to explain why her lack of intellectual appreciation of science or her skim-the-surface understanding of the earmark and budget system (and why it’s developed) so the wardrobe malfunction becomes what I—and the blogosphere—use to highlight her inherent problem. Which is her complete cynicism about what is really troubling America. She thinks a few folksy winks and stories about her earrings will fool people into thinking she “gets” the issues. But Americans have interesting instincts.
I’m a fashion-aholic and I have no problem with her wearing Valentino and Jimmy Choo. But as a political junkie, I have a problem with her trying to claim one status while portraying another. I have a problem with her attempts to snow the voters. Because Americans are busy, tired, weary, and over-inundated with sound bites. Here I am, with no kids and on a sabbatical from work and I can barely find the time to do all that’s needed to run a simple two-person household and keep up with election, war, and economic news. McCain and Palin are abusing that, and it’s going badly and I find it, as Bill Maher does, cynical; cynical to constantly think that the American people are so stupid as to fall for these tropes.
I can’t trust the American independent voter. I don’t believe they are applying any more judgment in this election than they did in 2004. But Obama is keying into what they want now and need in a way that Bush did in 2004 and in which McCain and Palin so spectacularly are not doing now. And at least Obama is trying to find a way to increase productivity in people’s lives. Worries about healthcare are a constant drain. Worrying about the wars is a constant headache. Worrying about the price of gas and how we can wean ourselves off of it are is nonstop acid reflux.
At some point Americans are going to have to start demanding increased productivity in their lives so as to better understand how they live them. And the only way to do that is to decrease the demands on our lives. I do believe this is a first step in this process, by shrugging off the politics as usual (Obama, no matter what you think of him, is anything but usual). The 30-second sound bite as the basis for a decision must die.
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