Me, I’m unable to fathom 10-year budget predictions and I’m incapable of knowing whose prescription payment plan is superior. I’m trying to figure out which presidential candidate would make a better president and I am reduced to trying to figure out who is the better person.
Before this campaign, neither Texas Gov. George Bush nor Vice President Al Gore had done much to make us dislike them. But since it started, they haven’t done anything to make us like them, either.
This is what it is like for an undecided voter right now. And even those of you who are “decided” may be just a misplaced fact or awkward gesture away from rejoining those of us who are Ping-Ponging back and forth between presidential candidates as we get closer to Election Day.
After the first debate, I was voting for Gore. How could you not? He was smarter and smoother and grammatically correct. Then I worried about the veracity of his statements. I told myself and others that his details may have been wrong but his ideas were right. But why did he have to say he walked on the moon with Neil Armstrong? I started to sway.
I thought Bush won the second debate. Gore was ramrod stiff and condescending. And Bush knew the names of foreign leaders and matched them with the right countries! I still wasn’t convinced he could do that all the time but I was more willing to believe he could get help on that more than Gore could on his own ethical compass. So Bush was my guy.
Then I changed my mind. More of Gore’s lies seemed to have reasonable explanations (He hadn’t walked on the moon with Armstrong but was there on 17 other missions) and Bush seemed to be telling a few fibs himself: He said if war were to break out, 15 percent of our armed forces would have to fight with garden tools. Plus, how could Bush stand there and get wrong something as basic as the number of people–out of three–the state planned to kill for a crime? Maybe he really did say “Grecians” …
During the third debate, it dawned on me that Gore was and always will be unable to save himself from his own earnest combativeness, a righteousness that when flexed is utterly obnoxious. My grade-school kids noticed this right off. Pointing to Gore, they said, “He’s a jerk. We like the guy with gray hair.” I was again a Bush guy.
Then next morning I read about the delicate balance in the Middle East and tried to imagine my folksy (This is code. It means the man talks slowly when blood rushes to his brain.) candidate trying to broker peace from Sharm el-Sheik, Egypt, which he would undoubtedly describe as, “over there, in the Far East, the mid-middle eastern Arabia of Egypt, you know.” I decided Bush would be my kind of governor but that he would scare me as president. I was decided.
I took a sip of coffee and then changed my mind. Sure, Bush wasn’t brilliant, but we survived Reagan’s presidency and he once said, “Hello, Mr. Mayor. How are things in your city?” to his secretary of Housing and Urban Development.
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And how do we know that Gore’s heavy-handed means of communication might itself not backfire? I imagined a peace summit where Gore, the Palestinian and Israeli leaders emerge and announce that they have agreed to declare war on the United States.
I’ve caught myself daydreaming about how I would feel if the popular vote difference in the election came down to one. While I absolutely believe in the gravity of my decision, I am amazed at how unable I am to decide which of these two characters will do a better job. At my current rate of flip-flopping, I estimate that if I vote in the morning, it will be Bush. If I vote after noon, Gore will get my vote. I can see the course of our nation for the next four years hanging in the balance as I arrange my day on Nov. 7.