David Sedaris "Undecided Voters"
David Sedaris is a well known American writer and humorist. This link to his article "Undecided Voters" is dated back to the 2008 election season, but as this year is the president's incumbency, I think we can still apply many of the perspectives Sedaris expresses about undecided voters in this story. What do you think he is trying to say in this story about undecided voters? Is it obvious? How can we apply what Sedaris has implied about undecided voters of the last election season to this one?
posted by Jordan Paul @ 11:58 PM
4 Comments:
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Yea I would agree with you, that it's not necessarily true that one cannot have a middle ground in this situation. Knowing some background about Sedaris, and have had read some of his material before, he is a very opinionated person so I can understand why he wouldn't understand a middle ground in an election such as this.
I think that it is pretty odd if someone doesn't have a pretty good grasp on who they are voting for at this point. Even if they do have "middle ground" kind of feelings about some of the issues, the issues should not hold the same weight for the average person. Even if you like this candidate's view on this issue and the other candidate's view on another issue, it should not take this long for them to decide which of those issues is more important to them, and this would help to guide a decision.
I agree with Ella that the undecided voters at this point probably just don't have the information they need to make a decision and, honestly, this late in the game, they probably don't care enough to get that info.
Have you guys seen the SNL skit about undecided voters? That's what this makes me think of. You should YouTube it if you haven't. It's pretty hilarious.
I think Sedaris is trying to point out how utterly different the two candidates are. He makes it obvious with his comparison to airplane food choices. And I think for the most part the implications he made about undecided voters in the 2008 election are the same as the ones this election. The two candidates clearly have different views on many of the same issues as the candidates did in 2008. It’s democrat vs. republican, spending vs. not spending, abortion legalized vs. illegal, universal health care vs. individual health care, and so on. Many of the issues remain the same, so Sedaris’s idea that whoever was undecided in the 2008 election is missing the obvious applies today as well.
I feel like he is almost saying there’s no way you can have middle ground in this election, and I don’t think that’s necessarily true. It might seem crazy to some people that other people really don’t have that much information on the issues, but it’s more common than they think. Some people don’t have access to all the information they feel like they need to vote (hard to believe with all the media pushing it in our faces these days), and some make a point to not get involved with politics.
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