Civics For Or By Morons?

The Swamp: Ron Paul's 'money bomb,' records and lessons

An unquestioned and forthright premise of this Baltimore Sun piece is that voting is like betting.

If your guy wins, you win, right? So the trick is to pick a winner. To vote any other way is to waste your vote.

Unless, of course, you are so profoundly alienated that you don’t mind throwing away your vote just to make a point.

There is no doubt that there are more stupid attitudes toward voting, elections, and deciding where to put your candidate money.

But this one is pretty much a howler.

And yet, this horse-race outlook absolutely pervades the media and even a great part of the political propaganda.

The media appeal to this notion to justify to the public their ignoring all but the front-running few for pretty much the whole length of the campaign.

As do the front-running candidates, themselves, of course, to justify efforts to force the rest of the field entirely off the stage.

Why does this work?

Well, they do say that nobody ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American people, and that half of all adults have below average IQs.

So is that horse-race thing civics for morons or civics by morons?

Hard to say.