It is the most obvious of clichés, the truest of truisms, yet we’ll go ahead and say it anyway: Please vote next Tuesday.
We’re advocating for neither Barack Obama nor Mitt Romney nor any of the other candidates for president, Congress or other offices.
We’re not telling you to lean for the Republicans or the Democrats, but to demonstrate your faith in democracy and the republic, for everything that America stands for and stands upon.
Less cliché, perhaps, but no less important is what we ask you not to do.
We urge Colorado Jews not to vote for any candidate based upon the simplistic, distorted, sometimes plainly false and usually malicious messages that have been clogging the arteries of television and radio for the last several months.
Regardless of which candidates these messages seek to support, most of them are the products of “super-PACs,” which is to say, well-financed entities with their own agendas and goals, not to mention their own often derelict standards for honesty and fairness.
Although declared legal by the Supreme Court, we find the vast majority of their propaganda not only insulting to the intelligence of the average American voter but harmful to the healthy, honest and informed debate that should stand as the standard of a democratic election.
In other words: Please base your vote on the facts and your personal interpretations and values. It’s a far more sound foundation on which to make your decision.
Secondly, we advise you to ignore the polls.
Polls — even those which truly are fair and uninfluenced by hidden agendas — are ephemeral phenomena. They can change from day to day, week to week, state to state and county to county. They follow the wind but are hardly an accurate barometer.
In other words: Be neither encouraged nor discouraged by what polls say. Vote your heart and your conscience, regardless of what they tell you.
It seems that every time we have a presidential election, the sages and candidates tell us that this is the “most important election of the century,” or some other rather dramatic phrase.
In truth, we really don’t know whether 2012 is dramatically more important than 2008 was, or 2004 or 1964 for that matter.
We suspect that all of them were dramatically important, just as the current one is. That alone justifies your vote, your participation in the wonderful system known as democracy.
May the best man win — with our help.
Copyright © 2012 by the Intermountain Jewish News
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