Alas, the uninformed voter

Hate to link to Pravda on the Potomac, but can't resist Alexander Burns' lament for the uninformed voter. Actually it's a piece about polling, which everybody on the A list seems to be talking about this morning. And didn't I just say this yesterday?

And “fickle” is a nice way of describing the voters of 2012, who appear to be wandering, confused and Forrest Gump-like through the experience of a presidential campaign. It isn’t just unclear which party’s vision they’d rather embrace; it’s entirely questionable whether the great mass of voters has even the most basic grasp of the details – or for that matter, the most elementary factual components – of the national political debate.

Gosh. If only there was some kind of organized profession dedicated to informing these poor unfortunates about issues, maybe they wouldn't be so confused. Maybe somebody can figure out how to start up something like that.

Meanwhile, you have to love this defense of the ever declining reliability of opinion polling.

And besides, said Quinnipiac pollster Peter Brown, if voters seem to the political class like they are temperamental or unreasonable, it’s sort of beside the point. Americans may change their policy views as they learn more or as events change, or for no good reason at all. But in the end, those views are the only metric in electoral politics that really matters.

So sayeth the man whose livelihood depends on producing polls.

Makes you wonder how this country survived for 200 years or so without daily opinion polls. Which the media talks every freaking day instead of doing those boring, informative policy pieces that just doesn't drive enough traffic to satisfy the marketing department.

[More posts daily at the Detroit News.]