Aquarian Weekly 10/11/00 REALITY CHECK
Campaign 2000 TAKING THE PULSE OF AMERICA
The results of a two-week, intense and expensive Reality Check News & Information Desk investigation on 2000 presidential election polling data and the organizations that sponsor such gathered numbers have produced a few salient answers.
The first of which is that hallucinogenic drugs most likely influence the individuals conducting the Gallup agency and Cable New Network polls. The type of primary narcotic is not known from our results, but we can be relatively assured within a six percent margin of error that these people are at least mildly sedated, or at worst, pretty fucked up.
The numbers compiled and published weekly in Newsweek magazine, although even further from anything resembling reality, do not seem so much effected by recreational consumption of mind-altering chemicals as they are just stupid. And although the ever-popular Battleground polls being run by the hour at voter.com appear stable and sober, we can only conclude that those compiling this information are distracted by countless hours of porno and the 700 Club.
On 9/20 Gallup had the vice president up by 10 points with a convention bullet. Two days later they had him up by five and this week they claim he trails by three. On August 1, Newsweek positioned the governor of Texas as a 17-point leader and one month later he was down by 15. Last week they were selling a dead heat. Those still awake at Battleground have had both main candidates pretty much even for six months. CNN has been going on the coin flip/spin-the-bottle method, periodically forcing Jeff Greenfield into his nightly stammer to explain it.
Never in the history of these United States has too-much-information reached its saturation point. Somewhere Marshall McCluen is puking or laughing or something.
For example, CNBC ran some bogus poll last week that Ralph Nader was dead and Pat Buchanan reached one percentage point. This has not effected either’s notoriety. And the Wall Street Journal has printed more than one poll result with Ronald Reagan involved.
It is our conclusion that there seems to be no point to these things anymore, unless someone is getting rich, laid or attempting to sound relatively intelligent after five martinis at the weekend mixer. But as a journalistic tool, the national poll of 700 disinterested or highly rankled shut-ins with lengthy agendas is no way to take the pulse of a nation.
However, there was a significant factor not added to our less-than-detailed equation prior to postulating the drug/porno theory for pollsters, and that is the fickle nature of a nation so bored and fed up with choosing from a pool of rich, white guys from political families sucking up to rapaciously bloated corporations and interest groups that they would rather watch people eat rats on an island or wonder why Eminem disses Christina Aquilera than spend five seconds giving half a turd who is running for president.
Many volunteers for our experiment informed myself and the other poor souls involved that the last of these speculations seemed the most plausible. I had personally given up on making sense of this psychotic shit around 1974, and no one else in the room could muster a single reason to drag their asses four feet to vote for George Bush or Al Gore even if either had agreed to assume their car payments. But the guilt of not participating in the patriotic duty of all Americans was strong, and more than half forced out motivations ranging from writing in Vincent Furnier to throwing a warm Pepsi on the instrument panel inside the voting booth.
This behavior was paramount in the next phase of our experiment, which included a full-scale three-state poll of our own.
Beginning with New Jersey on the first week of September, six Reality Check participants phoned nearly 300 residents of Bergen and Passaic counties and simply asked for whom they would cast their vote. Less than 50% planned to vote. The 20 to 30% range was saved for those mired in partisanship and a final 10% wanted to do the right thing, but had little to know idea what that would be.
Nearly 250 people polled in New York’s Westchester and Putnam counties were more interested in Hillary and Lazio and felt whomever’s party seemed to have any momentum in late October would get their attention. Again, more than 50% did not give a damn.
Finally, it can be said that citizens of Connecticut are best when hanging up. Nearly half of the 200 people we called would not let us finish a sentence. The others wanted to know how the hell their senator is simultaneously running for reelection and vice president.
Unfortunately, beyond the incredible amounts of beer and pizza ingested throughout the process, the whole affair was futile for us. Our endeavor had been nothing more than spitting into the wind, which is the clearest description of any of these Gallup jobs. The glut of them alone puts no credence into what may happen in that seminal moment when you have to decide either the lesser of two evils or choosing an administration that will spend the next four years dreaming up new and improved excuses for not honoring six months of fantasyland promises.
So, with a few weeks of campaign to go, and 35 seconds of clarity peppered throughout hours of debates and television appearances, it is our suggestion that drugs might not be worth your recreational dollar as much as it might help you make sense of what you are forced to endure.
Reality Check | Pop Culture | Politics | Sports | Music
Read More