Today’s Wall Street Journal has a story about the ”quirky, personal and unpredictable” decision making process of undecided voters. One voter filtered the candidates’ debate answers about negotiations with Iran through his divorce. Another, who initially supported Obama because like the candidate he was born in Hawaii and educated in Southeast Asia, is supporting McCain because he seems like a strong father figure. The Journal seems confused, and even a little troubled, by these criteria.
No one who has studied how people make decisions – about cars, homes, who we marry, you name it – should be at all surprised that our choice of candidates seems “irrational.”
People are not, it turns out, homo economus, dispassionately weighing data and measuring positions against an objective external standard. We are bears of little brains who construct and manage our worlds so that we can navigate our way through our lives. Of course voters decide whether or not it’s a good idea for foreign leaders to talk to each other based on their marriages (and divorces) – what other criteria are they going to use? Remarkably few voters have studied international relations theory or have foreign policy experience – and if political psychologists are right, those folks all rely on personal constructions of reality anyway. Of course it makes sense to support a leader because he seems like a strong father figure (even if you reject Lakoff), what other model for leadership do many people have?
Elections aren’t about candidates, they’re about voters. Elections are about our understandings of how the world works imposed on candidates who seem to share those understandings. My support for Barack Obama is based on a feeling that I can trust him – not whether or not he can trust me. As such, it is inevitable and obvious that voting decisions are personal ones.
and that's what the
and that's what the Republicans are banking on...oh bother (sic).