Letter writer: In presidential race, can voters spot a good deal when they see one?

Graphic by Lori Deaton

I’ve noticed lately how choosing whom to vote for feels a lot like buying a used car. You expect dishonesty; you expect to get screwed; you expect false promises and overdone pandering to which the likes of are only acceptable in one other institution: church.

You never expect things to go overly well, and when they do, you can’t help but feel like you’re about to wake up from the illusion of it at any moment. You know, that moment when the check engine light that flicks on while you are sipping your overpriced-morning-addiction coffee — that coffee that was supposed to fill your day with promise and resilient optimism.

That is how I have always felt about voting, and I’m pretty sure I am not alone in that. What else could explain how anyone could actually muster up the kind of forced enthusiasm it takes to admit, in a nonelusive way, that they’re voting for Hillary? We all know better.

Yes, we do.

But that is the sort of cognitive dissonance that we’ve become willing to accept from people who are known liars. And the thing that keeps hitting me lately is what would actually happen if you met a used-car dealer who was actually honest? Who had a proven track record spanning decades helping those who needed it the most?

Would we be too inundated by a sort of consumer disassociation to fully appreciate the novelty of salesmen who shocked us by breaking the mold? Perhaps a person whose quality of integrity was so novel that the title “salesperson” was outweighed by their more prominent title: human. We would look at them like, “What the hell are you doing here? You can’t actually be seriously offering me a deal that makes sense? This is a lot to take in.”

This, I believe, is the real reason that people and pundits are having a hard time wrapping their heads around Bernie Sanders. It’s not that he’s an admitted democratic socialist (it’s really not). It’s that he actually means what he says. And it freaks us out as Americans. The question is: Are we even going to be able to spot a good deal when we see one?

— Ryan Russell
Woodfin

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3 thoughts on “Letter writer: In presidential race, can voters spot a good deal when they see one?

  1. The Real World

    “The question is: Are we even going to be able to spot a good deal when we see one?”

    The answer is ‘ No’. Because whomever looks like a good deal is, in fact, not one. They just LOOK like one! See our current Prez for a perfect example of this charming phenomenon. Bernie Sanders is a sheepdog (a political term; Google it). He will eventually corral his supporters to Hillary, as planned. Some of the Republican candidates are acting as sheepdogs too for their eventual candidate.

    Our next Prez is predetermined by quiet, very powerful people in the background. For the national elections anyhow, our poking at the polls is just theater. As the always irreverent Mark Twain long ago said, “If voting made any difference, they wouldn’t let us do it.”

  2. Lulz

    LOL, while his style is commendable, his policies are not. Better wake up and realize that the debt is no laughing matter. And promises of freebies along with raising taxes on those who will simply leave is reality. Delusions and ignorance of those who believe the same people inside the beltway that make money by passing laws will cteate prosperity is simply insane.

    • NFB

      LOL, righties preaching about the debt after turning a record surplus into a record deficit and debt is hilarious. LOL.

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