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I heard this question from another random office imbecile the other day. Sadly, it had nothing to do with baseball playoffs or (more importantly) college football, or anything that easy to quantify. It was in reference to the first of three shallow, carefully scripted presidential debates.

Who won? WON?

I can’t tell you who won — I don’t know if anyone can, despite the pundits and their prognostications — but I can tell you who LOST: we did. The American people lost. We lost some time ago, and I’m not sure when, but I sure didn’t feel like a winner having watched Al and Dubyah.

Jim Lehrer did a fair job as moderator, but he might as well have stayed home. He didn’t add anything to the situation, because as I saw it, most of the questions ended with both candidates sticking to their guns on mutually contradictory scenarios that set them apart as the better candidate. (I say “better” instead of “best” b/c we all know full well that Buchanan, Nader, and whoever else stand no chance of catching double digits.) Each one had their own example of how their future was a brighter one; each one had their own example of how the other guy was going to screw you; neither managed to “win” with a convincing array of anything resembling facts. Mutually contradictory buzzclips, and Lehrer — and America — let them move on from there. We ate it up, walked away, and then dared to think we knew who “won”.

A lot of the issues come down to simple math, a skill that apparently 90% of the population lacks. So exactly how much are you spending on the military — not in relative terms, but in total? And what about the other guy? Simple enough concepts, but we’ll only hear about it in terms of deltas. And tax cuts? Is that as a percentage of income, or are you just pointing out that the richest 1% get the most taxes back because they’re paying the most taxes in the first place? It would take their economic advisers all of one day to fully and completely characterize for us their respective tax plans and distributions of benefits…but we wouldn’t hear it. Not for a minute.

We don’t HAVE a minute’s worth of attention span! The people that the candidates are pandering to are a bunch of idiots who wouldn’t follow them five minutes into The Truth. Their tiny little minds would be overwhelmed with facts and figures so fast that they might spontaneously combust. These are the large numbers of voters that the candidates are hungry for. These are the buttheads that produce electoral seats. These are The People, and they have produced this farce of an election process in this day and age of information supersaturation.

As a result of this system, the candidates are only going to say enough to get Joe Blow off his duff to vote for the nicest looking suit. There are no more issues, no more ideologies, no more agendas. It’s just GET ELECTED. Why? Because that’s the brass ring. You have to reach for it. (Especially if Daddy was president once and your current political domain is a cesspool of inefficiency.) The result? Voters with half a mind (or both) like me are left hungry and pissed off. Mainly pissed off that we’d even have to remotely consider voting for someone as ugly and uncharismatic as Ralph Nader.