For all the polls and all the ensuing examinations and dissections of those polls, every presidential election campaign, they all seem steeped in superficial sameness. There’s no genuine, long-range tracking or meaning applied, just a bunch of numbers followed by TV talk-talk.
For example, last week news media outlets reported that President Obama and Gov. Romney were on college campuses — Romney in Virginia, Obama in Ohio — appealing to the young for their votes.
The young or “student vote” is, as it should be, highly prized — thus highly coveted.
Yet, nowhere have we seen or heard of a poll or any kind of gauging device that tracks the voting patterns of the young as they age and, presumably, mature.
It stands to reason that the younger the voter, the more idealistic — and, yes, naive, about everything from credit cards to car leases — they tend to be.
That’s not a knock; it’s an empirical truth. I was that way, and so, likely, were you. And I’d never try to dissuade my kids from their high-minded ideals, especially since I likely helped instill them.
The youngest voters, for the most part, have no good reason — life-changing or seriously significant hands-on experiences — to be affected or afflicted by anything more applicable than idealism.
Their practical lives — raising families, paying mortgages, tax burdens, employment that sustains more than themselves, sending their kids to college — have not yet confronted them. They can afford to be impressed by candidates who best pitch idealism as practical politics.
That’s why presidential polling of young voters, as addressed and flatly studied by TV’s political commentators, seems to be a colossally incomplete exercise.
We’re never told what happens next. And then what happens after that.
What would make a more sensible, logical and likely more revealing poll would track the voting tendencies of folks in 10-year increments, from ages 20 to, say, 70.
Does idealism eventually share importance with realism? Do practical issues eventually replace conceptual ideals? Does wishful thinking eventually wilt until it’s discarded as wasted faith in the impractical? If so, when? At what age or ages, and given what sets of family, financial and all other food-on-the-table, sweat-rent circumstances?
In other words, is chasing the “young vote” the same as soliciting the support of voters who, over time, wouldn’t vote for the candidate for whom they now plan to vote?
Now there’s a poll that would be worth taking and worth studying, no?
* * *
In the car, the other morning, listening to National Public Radio . . .
A staff announcer starts a spiel about how too many Americans during presidential campaigns are given nothing more or better to help determine their vote than quips and dramatic sound bites lifted from speeches and debates.
But here at NPR, the announcer continued, listeners are provided substance — not sound bites, but in-depth analysis and thoughtful overviews.
That afternoon, back in the car, NPR on the radio. What’s on? Sound bites from the second Obama-Romney debate.
* * *
Last week, while appearing on ABC’s “Good Morning America,” Tom Hanks let an F-bomb “slip.” Judging from next-day reports, America was supposed to be shocked.
Yet, Hanks, for all his talent, seems to have some recidivist, attention-generating public comportment issues.
At the 2007 Golden Globe Awards, televised by NBC, Hanks was charged with the honor of presenting Warren Beatty with a lifetime achievement award.
Instead, Hanks “stole” the moment by vandalizing it with a terribly unfunny, highly vulgar, genitalia-focused speech that left the live audience in an awkward, uncomfortable state, while Hanks smiled the smile of the self-satisfied.
While Beatty graciously thanked him, he just as graciously could’ve punched him.