This Week In Village Idiocy

It was Eleanor Clift, in the Daily Beast, with the candlestick.  She's standing over the beaten corpse of political journalism with a really confused look on her face, too, like she's not quite sure if she was moving her arms to cave in the skull, or the candlestick moved on its own accord.  She stands surrounded by a focus group of independent voters.

Listening to these voters for over two hours, it was clear that their assessment of the economy is not as bleak as one would suppose, given their disaffection from Obama. They generally agree that the economy is improving, but Obama doesn’t get credit for a recovery that, while slow, is moving in the right direction—the core of his message for a second term. A few cited what they called “little things” Obama has done for the economy, like reining in credit-card companies, but no one could cite major accomplishments that would measure up to the expectations aroused by Obama as a candidate who promised to bring about transformative change.

This Denver group was sponsored by the Annenberg Public Policy Center of the University of Pennsylvania, and Hart’s findings add to a growing chorus of concern among Democrats not directly aligned with the Obama campaign that the president is not connecting with the voters he needs to win. Asked if he was feeling the heat from his allies in the Obama camp, Hart told The Daily Beast, “They know who I am, and that I’m a straight-shooter, and I’m totally in their corner. Sometimes being in their corner means telling them the truth.”

Whether it’s a failure of policy or of communications is debatable, but the sense of disillusionment with Obama’s performance is real. “He set up expectations that began 46 months ago, and they only grew over time,” says Hart. He singled out Jeffrey, a 31-year-old Web designer and home remodeler, as the voter Obama most needs and might not get. Jeffrey voted for Obama last time.

“The whole platform was hope—I don’t feel any more hope today,” he said. Pressed by Hart as to which candidate he was leaning toward, Jeffrey said the tenor of the campaign turned him off, that he felt like he was in the middle of a weird argument between a husband and wife, and all he wanted to do was leave the room. “I don’t even know if I’m going to vote this time,” he said glumly.

And the bolded clues there are for Eleanor's benefit.  There's something that they all have in common, demonstrated most aptly by a woman with a weekly political op-ed column seemingly baffled by why voters apparently know nothing about Mitt Romney's time at Bain Capital.  All they know is that OBAMA FAILED THEM and that they don't really know anything about the other guy.

If only there were a group of Americans whose job it was to disseminate information and report on political developments with the intent of having a robust, informed electorate.  Sadly, I can't think of anyone like that and if such a group of "reporters" did exist, Eleanor Clift wouldn't know one from a 26-pound wheel of Gorgonzola cheese.

It's possible she may have cacked one of these "reporters", but the independent voters apparently saw nothing, so they don't feel any particular need to engage right now in the whole political process anyway.

It remains a total mystery as to why, of course.