Dispatch: The First

A dear friend and colleague of mine at the Jagiellonian University in Poland has asked me to write something for an academic audience about the impending U.S. presidential election of 2012. She would like me to attend to the public debate surrounding this event and its influence on the outcome. In my own mind I would defer for a number of reasons: 1) While I have an academic background not entirely irrelevant to the task, I have long since relinquished professional, academic aspirations; 2) I have no particular expertise in the contemporary techniques, quantitative or qualitative, of political scientific analysis or media study, either of which would seem required for anything like what she has requested of me; 3) I have serious doubts if anything that gets said or written by or about the candidates in the seemingly boundless discourse on this endless process will have any significant effect upon the outcome. I’ll stop there.

However, because you are a dear and a dear friend, Dr. Banaś, I will humor you with my thoughts on this election and the sound and fury that accompany it. Make of these notes what you will.

For other readers, please know that I would probably be described as a "liberal," and I have no particular problem with that label, except that it broadens, like the label "conservative," to the point of meaninglessness. Perhaps it will be more pertinent to note that I voted for Barack Obama in the last election, though I supported Hilary Clinton in the Democratic primary. On rare occasions in my life, I have voted for moderate Republican candidates at the state and national level. I have no strong affiliation to the Democratic Party, though I had made contributions to it during the most recent Bush administration. I do not have, and will not make, time to undertake more extensive research beyond what I do to inform myself as a citizen, limited and biased as my sources may be. I routinely scan news as it appears on my Yahoo feed, which includes stories from the major media outlets; I read these periodicals regularly—the Atlantic, Harper’s, The New Yorker, and The New York Review of Books—all fairly mainstream liberal publications, and listen almost daily to NPR, National Public Radio. I am neither a news nor a political junkie, and much prefer literature of a less pop-cultural stripe.