A Wild Night with Bill Schneider

Well, I might as well do something educational with this blog. No one's reading it, true, but that doesn't mean I can slack off. When this blog has become massively popular (please, God? please?) people will no doubt me combing through the archives to find where the magic began.

So let me tell you about a lecture by Bill Schneider I attended a few days ago. Schneider, if you're unaware (and by "you," I mean...I don't know who I mean) is the bald, dumpy fellow who appears on CNN and analyzes exit polls. Ably assisted by Soledad O'Brien, he'll tell you how the electorate is voting--Who are the young people voting for? Who are the old people voting for? Who are the transgendered Hindu homemakers voting for?*

The subject was "The Media in Politics," or, possibly, "Politics in the Media," but the general thrust was, Who's going to win in 2008? Bill (I consider him a first-name basis friend) took a very voter-centric position on this question. Who the candidate is is not terribly important. People pick the president by asking themselves the question: What do I want that I'm not getting from the incumbent? Bill called this the "Law of the Missing Imperative."

To prove his point, Bill went through a list of "themes" used by past presidential candidates. There were the succesful ones--Bill Clinton had "empathy" in 1992, Reagan had "strength" in 1980, and Carter had "morality" in 1976. And there were the ones that didn't work quite so well: Walter Mondale and "fairness" in 1984, Mikey Dukakis and "competence" in 1988.

What people want today is straight talk--or so Bill would have you believe. They want somebody who will give it to 'em straight. Whether they would enjoy this resultant straight talk is questionable, but I digress. The people also want somebody capable of rising above partisan bickering, and who can make government "work" again.

Boiled down to the barest bones: Schneider thinks it's going to be between McCain and Obama. Obama, he says, taps into that sort of post-partisan vein a lot of candidates--Howard Dean and Bill Bradley, for instance--have mined, but he has the added advantage of overwhelming black support. A potent combo! McCain, meanwhile, is lucky not to be tarred by an association with the Bush administration. This, Schneider told us, is the reason the race is fairly close when everything is pointing towards a Democratic landslide.

Then there were some questions and...oh my God, I've just gone on for like five pages. Sorry for taking up so much of your time. Next time I discuss politics, I promise to bloviate a lot less.

*Ron Paul REVOLUTION!