Thank goodness the 2008 election is finished.  I have to say my own mind was basically made up many months ago.  My candidate didn’t win, nor would my candidate have won had the McPalin ticket swept the polls.  So you could say I’m a bit of an outlier.  This position afforded me a little luxury to follow the battle without a strong emotional investment in either major party.

I’m still shaking my head.

I tried to sift through the epithets and flaming arrows to find cogent, rational arguments for aligning with Democrat or Republican, and I really couldn’t.  I’m slow sometimes, but I really tried.  All I found was that the parties had a common theme: “We’re not the other guys.”

But, in fact, both parties have been behaving badly for years, with Republicans seeming to have departed from core principles in a more dramatic way than the Democrats.  The Dems actually appear to me to have come back towards center without a will to fight for radical, sweeping social agendas.  At the same time, the Republicans have abandoned any notion of small government or fiscal responsibility, and they have thought nothing of trampling individual rights into the dust.

In a post-election interview with NPR’s Morning Edition, Dick Armey gave a succinct, clear [1] post-mortem for his party, reinforcing my own conclusion about moving far away from basic party ideals.  Also, I thought one phrase he used was particularly apt for elected officials across the board.   “Delinquency in office” has failed constituents and the country in a wholesale manner.  The tripod of a federal government balanced between three branches has just about toppled over, yet neither party seems to have recognized the need to address this problem, either.

Thus, trying to follow presidential and local campaigns was a lot like tracking an argument between Ford and Chevy owners.  Even normally rational folks lose their cool over cars.  People seemed to be voting for a brand rather than any inherent differences in function or quality of the products.

Suddenly, this made some sense to me, especially given the general lack of critical thinking and the programmed-consumer nature of our society.  I started reading up on related topics from marketing psychology to “magical thinking”, which proved immensely valuable in understanding what was going on.  No wonder there was little substance to the arguments.  The parties’ efforts and campaign dollars have been focused on very sophisticated consumer programming, not much more.

The up-side, of course, is that we’re much more homogenous in our thinking (or lack of it) than the executive producers of “Survivor - Washington, DC” would have us think.  We really have come together as a nation.

Is this a great country, or what?