Blink '08

So here I am. All eyes of the nation are on me. I am a citizen of New Hampshire, with the first in the nation primary election. Not only am I a citizen, I am a registered voter. Beyond that, I am a registered independent, one of those bothersome Yankees who will not declare allegiance to one party or another, but reserve the right to vote any time I want for whomever I damn well please. This makes me a hot political commodity for the next few days. Millions on millions seek my opinion, attempt to discern my judgment, desire to plumb the depths (or shallows) of my political views. Therefore, I am become the Accidental Pundit.
Of course, I am not alone here. There are about a million or so other residents of the state, about 700,000 registered voters, of which some 40% are independents like me. I have many friends who have been complaining about receiving multiple phone calls each day for polling or campaign calls from candidates. I personally haven’t received any political phone calls. Therefore, I have to say that while no one is specifically seeking information on my individual vote, I am a cell in a larger organism. If the cell that is me should twitch one way, along with enough of my neighbors, the political muscle that is NH will contract and turn the national corpus just so. The nation may not stay moving in that direction, but once moving, it may be hard to change. It will depend on how the rest of the states twitch.
I am not a real pundit. I really don’t have the chops to sort through the policy papers of all the candidates. If I did, I’m not sure I would have a deep enough understanding of the national and international issues involved to make an adequate logical choice. So, I blink.
This means my decision is going to be made based on rapid cognition. You can call it gut feeling or intuition if you wish. Malcolm Gladwell, in his book Blink: The Power of Thinking without Thinking, sets out the thesis that we make most of our decision really in about two seconds, with a pretty thin slice of the available data, that we then subconsciously extrapolate. The book is largely “about those two seconds, because I think those instant conclusions that we reach are really powerful and really important and, occasionally, really good.”
Basically this means that I have been watching, listening to, and reading about the candidates. I have been developing a sort of gut reaction to each. Frankly, I like several of them a lot, and think I would be reasonably content if they won. But I have to pick one. So…I blink.
I’m still blinking. I have definite leanings, but won’t know for sure until I fill in the little circle all nice and black. Me and a bunch of others. Then the nation will know what we thought, how we blinked and which direction we twitched. My moment of punditry. Then the chattering masses move on to someplace else and leave us in peace. And God help us all.