“US heads for cliffhanger election.” Is the BBC serious!?

Things must be really dull over there in England since that jubilee thing winded down. The BBC headline today reads: “US heads for cliffhanger election.” There’s usually more excitement in the ninth inning of a Little League baseball game but okay call it cliffhanger if you want. Most US voters don’t feel the anticipation but only relief--one might even call it glee that the 2 year ordeal is ending. The majority of eligible voters don’t bother to register; of those registered, only half actually vote. There’s a lot of game theory involved in calculating election turn-outs, like zero-sum game, minimax theorem, linear programming duality, and Nash equilibrium. But there’s no need to complicate the obvious & the banal. Both candidates are bums & many don’t want to make a choice between the lesser of two bums.

Senator Bernie Sanders, from Vermont, once said low voter turn-out reflected apoliticism and apathy & that’s likely quite true for a large number of people. But it may also indicate the acuity of millions who can’t distinguish a meaningful difference between the two candidates. They always do exit polls at US elections but they might learn more about their game theory if they interrogated the stampede away from the polls. We can be found hiding under our covers, drowning our electoral sorrows in the corner pubs, hiding out in cinemas, or watching HBO where we can get away from election commentators. Some countries, like Australia, mandate voting. If that were so in the US, there would be millions of fugitives from injustice.

Both Romney & Obama use teleprompters at their speeches, as have several presidents including Reagan and both Bushes, notorious for mangling language & eschewing coherent thought. If Washington, Adams, Jefferson, Lincoln & all those other guys knew that they’d turn over in their graves & become an important source of energy. Public oratory is supposed to be mastered before you run for office, not tutored during an election campaign. But allegedly, Obama has been running the country for four years--& he still can’t talk without a reader!? God save us!?