the little engine that can't

there's a decent article on grace ross in the boston globe today. i know you need to log in to the site to see it, and that's a nuisance, but you don't have to pay them anything and they never e-mail. because it's a nuisance, though, and because they allow subscribers to read the articles for free, i'll be happy to e-mail the text to you if you'd rather not give yourself one more password to remember. the most striking passage, to me, was not directly about ross, but about the stellar political acuity of college students (and probably a lot of their parents):

dubiously eyeing the throng waiting for ross in a student center lounge, one student commented to another, "i'll probably vote for healey or something." replied the other, as they walked away, "or deval."

oh. my. god. oh my god. OH MY GOD! i love democracy and everyone should have the right to vote, but if this is all the thought you plan on putting into your decision, i would just as soon have you opt not to exercise that right. we complain about the embarassingly low percentage of the population that turns out for elections, even presidential ones, and it's true that we should do better, but not just in terms of turnout numbers. people don't want to take the time to learn anything about the candidates, they want newspaper headlines and commercials and other people to tell them whom they want and why. it's insane. while i can't swear that all of her policies would be winners in practice, ross has a lot of excellent ideas that deserve to be heard by everyone in this state. she is an exceptionally bright woman who has literally dedicated her life to community service. she's been entirely honest with the public. she's never danced around a question (healey) or tried to pad thin statements with charm (patrick) or been a crazy person (mihos), but because she can't afford a tv spot, no one's considered her. her loss in this election is a foregone conclusion, but her presence in the debates forced the top contenders to step up their game more than they ever would have done if they'd only had each other to consider, and i really hope that this isn't the last we see of her. if nothing else, she puts some pressure on other candidates to be more public representative than politician, and that's something we're all guaranteed to benefit from.

unless the public that wound up with the most representation was the percentage that plans to vote for healey or deval or something, in which case we'd all get, well, more of what we've been getting, i guess. everyone who runs will tell you he or she is the one who can get us over that hill, but the problem is the huge amount of dead weight in the rear car--the thousands of people sitting on their hands, scowling and muttering to each other about how they can't understand why it's taking so long to get over the hill. push, damn it! and think about steering, too.