Sort of political Monday

Ontario election edition
Well, here we are in the middle of a campaign.

So, here's a question for you: Why do we pay attention to campaigns?

To help you make up your mind, take a look at the people who take campaigns very seriously. Political junkies are among the shallowest people on earth. Jersey Shore fans are deep thinkers with deep meaningful things to say about life compared to the bloggers you'll find at this link.

My father used to say that if you ever wanted to know what not to buy, just take a look at what gets stolen most often. You can make yourself a better person simply by not owning or coveting the things that people who willingly steal or willingly buy as stolen goods want. Politicians may or may not be crooks but political junkies are very much like people who deal in stolen goods, no matter who you vote for you want to reject the values of political junkies.

These people spent a huge amount of pixels critiquing the campaign bus of one of the candidates. Do you want to make political decisions based on those values?

Here's another way to think about it: Do you want to fire Dalton McGuinty or do you want to keep him? That's the real question. He's been in power a few years, how happy or unhappy are you with the guy?

Imagine that you've been asked to do a performance assessment of an employee but instead of sitting down and considering the work the guy has done the last few years, he wants you to come down to the boardroom and listen to a PowerPoint presentation and assess him based on that. And he is going to spend most of this presentation talking about anything but his past record. That doesn't make sense, so why decide how to vote that way?

Remember that he works for you. These guys are just a politicians. They aren't admirable people and they always land on their feet. He's a lot richer and more powerful than you are and he'll still be that even if you help fire him. Don't spend any time worrying about the fate of the leaders or their parties.

And don't worry about negative consequences. Things may go bad—in fact, they almost certainly will—but nothing you can vote for or against will have the slightest effect on the larger forces that are at work in politics. Both parties agree on far more than they disagree and even the points they disagree about amount to little more than nuance.

Remember, also, that there is a huge and deeply interested public service that is heavily invested in maintaining growth in the government sector place on the one side and an existing set of programs that are already sucking up all the available cash on the other side. Even a radical conservative candidate could only slightly slow the growth of government and even a radical progressive could only slightly speed it up. And there are no radical candidates in this election anyway.

That's the political junkies' biggest lie. They want you to believe that a huge amount hangs on who you vote for. That's crap. Who you vote for is a small, unimportant decision in your life.

My advice is this, decide who'd you want to vote for on the the day the campaign starts without paying any attention to what the politicians or political junkies say and stick with your choice. And find an advance poll, it gets the campaign over with more quickly.