Bob Corker’s recent, kinda, maybe extremely racist negative ad campaign against Tennessee Senator Harold Ford Jr. has reminded me of a quandary that I face every election cycle. In a specific sense, if I lived in Tennessee for whom would I vote? To put it more generally, what do I do if I detest both candidates?

Now of course, I could never stomach a candidate that uses flagrantly prejudiced negative campaign advertisements like Bob Corker, though I suppose that goes without saying. The sheer breadth of negative ads used by the Republicans this season (90% of their budget!) serves as a powerful turnoff in and of themselves, though I hardly need any new reason to find the Republicans distasteful.

Yet, Corker’s Democratic opponent Harold Ford Jr. doesn’t exactly strike me as quite a prince, either. As far as Democrats go, you can’t get much more conservative. Ford openly opposes gay marriage, supports a Federal Marriage Amendment, considers himself pro-life, and backed both the Iraq War and Justice Samuel Alito. So how could I choose between these two, if I had to?

Fortunately, I don’t live in Tennessee, but a similar conflict arises everytime I heard of scandal, poor policy, or bad taste on the part of either party. And in this, the year of the smear campaign, you can scarcely find a candidate that doesn’t leave a bad taste in your mouth. I can’t even fathom how the average voter, operating based on political ads and shallow news coverage alone, can make sense of a thing.

Choosing the “lesser of two evils” has become the voting standard for many in the U.S. In large part, I don’t think we question this practice. We throw support to an unsavory candidate or party solely because the other option looks worse- Corker seems more bigoted than Ford, Bush will harm our country more than Kerry, etc. Does anyone recall the “anyone but Bush” campaign-of-sorts in 2004? That movement alone speaks powerfully about this trend.

I believe voting for the lesser of two evils has become a deeply engrained social norm of the political climate. It doesn’t seem odd to support a lackluster candidate because, hey, what else could you possibly do? We’ve always voted this way, the logic goes. Once habit turns to expected standard, a behavior proves hard to change.

Yet our constant lesser-of-two-evils voting method necessarily reinforces the negative ads and the sea of spin that makes politics so confusing and messy. It does not take a PhD in behavioral psychology to realize that we have our political parties on a perfect variable ratio schedule (see my post here). Negative ads don’t need to work all of the time, or even most of the time. So long as it pays off at the polls occasionally- with the unstable ebb and flow of public opinion- it rewards and reinforces the behavior.

I haven’t the faintest clue how we can break out of this mess. Some of the alternative options employed by other countries seem downright absurd. The French can- and have- cast “white votes”; blank ballots showing support of no candidates whatsoever, but such a maneuver won’t make a lick of a difference in reality. When we chide apathetics into voting, we tell them that they can make an impact on the world, that their vote does matter. But where do we go when it doesn’t matter how we vote?

This entry was posted on Monday, November 6th, 2006 at 9:04 pm and is filed under American Culture, Bigotry, Current Events, Media, Politics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.