You'll Always Find Us Out to Lunch...

Well, we're down to the wire of an agonizingly long election.

I think I'm pretty much tapped out on pithy one-liners and enlightened prose discursions. So, I'll just let the Sex Pistols express how I'm feeling right now, considering the (apparent) over-dermination of a Barack Obama electoral victory tomorrow. Please enjoy, "Pretty Vacant":

There's no point in asking
You'll get no reply
Oh just remember I don't decide
I got no reason it's too all much
You'll always find us out to lunch
Oh we're so pretty
Oh so pretty we're vacant
Oh we're so pretty
Oh so pretty
A vacant...

Now before any (lefty) readers blow this off as sour grapes, remember ... I'm a political scientist, and there's oftentimes more emotion than reason in voter decision-making, as Larry Bartels explains at today's Los Angeles Times:

In 1960, a team of researchers from the University of Michigan described "the general impoverishment of political thought in a large proportion of the electorate." Shifts in election outcomes, they concluded, were largely attributable to defections from long-standing partisan loyalties by relatively unsophisticated voters with little grasp of issues or ideology. A recent replication of their work found that things haven't changed much....

Voters' strong tendency to reward incumbents for peace and prosperity and punish them for bad times looks at first glance like a promising mechanism of political accountability, because it does not require detailed knowledge of issues and policy platforms. As political scientist Morris Fiorina has noted, even uninformed citizens "typically have one comparatively hard bit of data: They know what life has been like during the incumbent's administration."

Unfortunately, "rational" rewarding and punishing of incumbents turns out to be much harder than it seems, as my Princeton colleague, Christopher Achen, and I have found. Voters often misperceive what life has been like during the incumbent's administration. They are inordinately focused on the here and now, mostly ignoring how things have gone earlier in the incumbent's term. And they have great difficulty judging which aspects of their own and the country's well-being are the responsibility of elected leaders and which are not.

This election year, an economic downturn turned into an economic crisis with the dramatic meltdown of major financial institutions. John McCain will be punished at the polls as a result. Whether the current economic distress is really President Bush's fault, much less McCain's, is largely beside the point.

Or, as Johnny Rotten might say:

Don't ask us to attend
'cos we're not all there.
Oh don't pretend 'cos I don't care
I don't believe illusions 'cos too much is real
So stop your cheap comment
'cos we know what we feel...

Anyway, thanks, dear readers, for tuning-in here at American Power throughout the year.

As always, I'll have more later... until then, vote life.