Introduction: How I Became a Democrat

Last weekend I went out to Nevada to canvass for the Obama campaign—which was great, I recommend it to anyone, check out barackobama.com for info on volunteering these last few crucial weeks. The standard policy for canvassing is that you do one of three things, depending on what the person you encounter tells you: if they’re already for Obama, you ask them to sign up to volunteer. If they’re for McCain, you say thanks and get the hell out of there. And if they’re undecided, then and only then do you try to tell them the facts and get them to sway to the Obama camp.

The line of thinking as to why you don’t try to convince the McCain people is that it’s a waste of time: they’re rooted in the way they think and it’s more effective to galvanize undecided voters rather than to get into a screaming fight with McCain supporters. I would also add that a McCain supporter is just gonna slam the door in your face anyway, so you won’t even get the chance to argue.

Now, this strategy seems absolutely logical when it comes to canvassing, but what about in general? What I mean is, what was it that made those people become McCain supporters, and what life experiences or thought processes would have made them otherwise?? I.e. what makes someone decide to have one political belief instead of another (and therefore, hopefully, what can help us change people's minds)? A lot of it seems to be culture, especially ethnicity and religion, but even within those confines, there is a lot of gradation.

And what about undecided voters??? As the Daily Show has depicted, people are facepalming themselves over how the hell someone could be undecided this late in the game. I’m even gonna take that a step further and say that I don’t understand “swing voters,” probably because I just don’t understand why someone reasonable enough to vote for Democrats would ever even consider voting for a Republican.

But I’m gonna get into all of that later. Right now I’m just going to introduce my latest series in my blog that no one reads. I want to get down and dirty into the nitty gritty of what forms people's political opinions. Because we can throw around insults all day, bickering over who said what and Bill O’Reilly this and Keith Olbermann that, but at the end of the day, we’d be shouting for and excusing precisely the opposite people if they believed what we believed. So I just want to talk about what we believe, getting down to the very atoms of opinion.

And of course, this is not going to be a scientific or psychological process by any means. This is an examination by a layperson to all fields (hence a philosopher? HA!), merely an anecdotal and biographical examination of the development of political opinion. And where best to start but with myself, with how I became a Democrat.