Wanting To Believe

Sports: Every dog has his day and all that, but the last two games of the Red Sox/Yanks series were a bit lame. Game Seven was over pretty early, though for some reason they trotted out Pedro Martinez (likely Game 1 starter?) for an inning, the score 8-1 (Red Sox). I have not really read the after game analysis ("Yanks choke" and "Tom Gordon: Who's Your Daddy?" or "Kevin Brown: Idiot" are possible headlines), but this is a tad dumb. The Yanks actually got two runs off the guy, though the Red Sox got them back off Gordon. As an aside, the fact someone died during the celebrations (by the police controlling the crowd; early reports have her not at fault) is horrible. The Astros/Cards series ended in a more evenhanded fashion though I rather the results were switched. The official color this year must be red.

This photo, thanks to Political Animal, highlights that not only does President Bush have a bit of troubling connecting desire with reality, the same applies to his likely voters. You can click on the photo for a better view, but basically only on defense spending and who should primarily be involved in writing the Iraq Constitution [both stances are rather obvious] do his supporters realize what his positions are.

This allows Bush's campaign to use nice sounding rhetoric to confuse matters (surely not intentional!) and supporters think the President agrees with them. Kerry's supporters do understand his views, except on the issue of defense spending (43%). If one checks out the analysis, part of the problem is that people want to support Bush, want to believe him. Thus, when people who sound like they know what they are talking about argue his tax policies are if anything unfair to the rich (see today at Slate, fray economists discussed the fallacies in the piece; many also argued the value of progressive taxation), it's quite useful. They want to believe.

Or, when conservative leaning bloggists like Dan Drezner appear to try to find a reason not to vote for Kerry (his soul searching on some level seems quite laudable, but something seems amiss when he says things like "now I'm 70% likely to vote for Kerry" like he means "I'm drawing away from the dark side ... help me out!" Lame statements like the one discussed here only make one more suspicious.) This tendency is shared by both sides to some extent, but it is troubling that it seems so disproportional these days. Elections are surely not totally rational affairs, but on some level, they have to be, or we will be in a rather troubling situation.