"Sway" Voters Bother Me to No End

It should amaze me to note how quickly presidential approval rises or falls from week to week, or how much relative preferences in polls dramatically shift from one candidate to another in a campaign. After all, the president or a candidate may say something silly or even disagreeable from time to time, but that should not be enough to account for the sometimes drastic shifts in public opinion polls. If Obama's approval rating was recently at 50% and now it's suddenly down to 40%, something substantial must be causing this, right?

The only discernible reason I see for the 10% drop in our president's job approval rating is the sudden hike in gas prices, which brings up an interesting point. All I've heard from the right for the last four years is how Barack Obama is a socialist who wants the federal government to manage the economy. These voices fervently support the idea of a privately-based free market in which prices for goods and services are regulated, not by the state, but rather by the law of supply and demand. Well, I suppose that's all very good and fine if prices are cheap, but when the market for a necessary commodity (in this case it's oil) dictates a rapid spike in price, somehow it is the "socialist" president's fault for not directly intervening with the authority of the government to hold costs down.

As for the presidential candidates running on the Republican side, I can't for the life of me figure out the drastic changes in polls from even one day to the next. After all this time, you might rationally suppose that people, with all of the media access available to them these days, would have been able to form their own opinions and preferences regarding these candidates. Instead, a large swath of the voting population seems to be content with swaying with the political breeze. It's these "sway" voters who scare me more than the demagogues seeking power and who also have inspired the kind of almost insanely negative and largely dishonest campaign banter that has been inflicted upon this nation over the course of recent months...

C'mon, if you haven't been able to figure out whom you support or oppose by now, you might just as well stay home and forget about it, as far as I'm concerned. Because, quite frankly, that would mean you're just the kind of voter who would put a real problem into office (and into power) because of some vague, irrational, and emotional appeal ...