NP - Romney/Ryan

[alice wellintown]

are the voters foolish enough to cast their votes for a pretty face or
a voice that intoxicates or some other surface feature that disuades
attention from the issues and what impact a particular elected person
might have on their future? Or are the voters not even conscious of
these seemingly unimportant elements that influence their votes? Do
voters cast their votes for leaders they believe they believe in or
support, even though they have been manipulated by sex-appeal or some
other non-political attraction. there are, of course, people who
believe that looks are quite important to leadership and thus would
never vote for, say, Lula, who looks bad in a suit, has bad hair, a
missing finger, is too short and dark complected next to the
kennedy-types he runs against. but then when ugly Abe was elected the
mass re-production of images and words, in print and records, then
moving images, had not yet manufactured the mass vulgarity in voters,
people with higher wages, who can read and write and watch tv. so it
seems a double edged thing this beauty vote. on the one hand
democratization of technologies and access to images and sounds, the
skills of reading and writing, the wages to produce and purchase
political information from the greay industry that has been built to
manufacture and sell it to the voters, has multiplied the power of the
vulgar voters and made rare the talented politician or sateman. and,
can a Ryan complain, as brilliant blondes do, that he is being treated
like a football star, assumed to be dumb, when he is, while not a
liberal darling of the press, still a smart man with ideas that
liberals reduce to shampoo comercials at the expense of the debate and
the voters? sure. the output of trash, of spin, of propaganda, and its
consumption is multiplied not because Ryan is cute, but because Obama
can not run on his record and Romney can not run on his. still, i will
vote for the black man because he inspires me to be a better wife to
my black husband.