Sunday, August 29, 2004
(9:29 PM) | Adam Kotsko:
Possible Aid to the Kerry Campaign
Someone needs to make a quiz for uninformed voters to help them pick the candidate who is right for them. They need to design it, however, so that the overwhelming majority of responses will point toward Kerry. This can be done in two ways. First, one could make all the answers to a given section point toward Kerry, though wording them in such a way that they appear to represent discrete, mutually exclusive options:In terms of foreign policy, I want a president who:Sure, that might not be the best way to word it, but it all points toward Kerry. You could also count any ideas where the two candidates agree as votes for Kerry. Second, one could word Bush answers in such a way that a moderate person could not possibly agree with them:
- believes in projecting American power abroad.
- wants to work as closely as possible with our allies.
- believes that international terrorism should be a major factor in foreign-policy decision-making.
If I were trying to solve our nation's health care crisis, I would:Again, probably not as subtle as it could be.
- design a plan whereby the federal government would cover all catastrophic health costs, thus making health insurance premiums more affordable for everyone.
- design a prescription-drug benefit for Medicare but avoid using the federal government's potential bargaining power in order to negotiate lower prices, thus ensuring maximum costs for taxpayers and maximum profits for already-rich drug companies, so that they can produce more commercials.
This may seem stupid, but on that "2000 Election Calculator" from the New York Times that was floating around a few weeks ago, there were several scenarios in which the election was decided by fewer than ten votes. Surely some right-wing blog would discover our evil scheme and report on it, but we're dealing with uninformed people here -- they won't care. The right has shown how effective misinformation can be, even if it is later decisively shown to be false. If we can make up an objective-seeming computer program that gives people the misinformation that they would prefer John Kerry over George Bush, it would seem relatively innocuous compared to the misinformation that John Kerry made up the whole Vietnam thing during an acid trip with some Russian spies or something.
