Wednesday, November 5, 2008

Strap in!

First, that is strap "in", not "on"...

I'm still amazed at the U.S. election process.

There are somewhere around 305M people in our country.
Around 228M of those are eligible to vote.
About 118M people decided to vote. A little over half the eligible voters.

Of that, 62.6M people decided Obama was their choice.

So, 20% of our total population feels he is the right man for the job.
And 27% of eligible voters felt the same way.

And that is the best we, as a country can do? A man that 27% of us (at best) can get behind?

Obama, McCain, I didn't vote for either. Both were not good candidates. What do we have to do to get a candidate that is good? That we can ALL get behind?

6 comments:

Desmond Jones said...

Well, you know, of course, that we'll never get a candidate we can ALL agree on.

I remember '76 (the first time I voted for president, btw); I voted for Ford, but didn't feel too bad that Carter won. Which opinion I had occasion to change, over the course of the next four years. . .

for a different kind of girl said...

Science would have to build that kind of candidate, and then that would probably unleash a reign of terror when the robot president got a screw loose.

Anonymous said...

We can't even agree on a church, or even the right kind of church, or even whether TO church. How could we possibly agree on who to blame for all our woes?? :-)

FTN said...

I think the clear choice is FTN in '12.

Phyllis Renée said...

But look at what this election has done -- it was an historical number of voters. So maybe it's just the push we needed to get some people off their butts and get involved. I believing something really good is going to come from this. Kind of an ashes-to-beauty thing.

Sailor said...

As dismaying as the participation numbers are, it's heartening that they are higher than in a long, long time.

Personally, I'd be very suspicious of someone that we can "all get behind". One of the strengths in our process, I think, is that we have the alternative views and a mixed bag of representatives.

Now, FTN may just have something there, though!