Have you noticed a growing trend in the liberal media lately? A reporter finds an "undecided voter" who can't quite figure out for whom to vote for president. Then after a period of "soul-searching," this "undecided voter" finally decides. And guess who they ultimately decide to vote for? Need I even bother to answer that question? In any event, let us take this New Yorker article by George Packer as a typical example of an "undecided voter" deciding. First the set-up in which the bonafides of the "undecided voter" is established (emphasis mine):
I met Jay Pitchford at a coffee shop in Columbus, Ohio, while reporting my campaign piece “The Hardest Vote.” He was almost fifty, a father of three, and a salesman for Liebert, a company that builds battery back-up systems for information technology. He was a neatly dressed, well-spoken, organized man, who lived in a largely Republican area where the neighborhood dads got together once a month on someone’s deck to eat, drink, and talk. Lately the talk had been about the election. Several of the dads were undecided, including Pitchford.
He described himself as a Rockefeller Republican, but it would be more accurate to say he was a Reagan Republican: he cast his first vote for the Gipper in 1980, and during the Reagan years Pitchford truly believed it was morning in America. “It’s been disappointing to see the religious right progressively take over the Republican Party,” Pitchford said. “It’s not so much that I drifted away from them as they drifted away from me.” Obama appealed to him, but Pitchford wondered whether he had the experience to lead the country. Just when Pitchford was about to make up his mind in one direction or the other, Obama or McCain would do something too obviously political. Pitchford was one of those voters looking for a reason to believe—“and so far they’ve both given me reasons not to vote for them.”
Oooh! Oooh! Don't keep us in suspense, George. We just have absolutely no clue as to whom this "Rockefeller Republican" (strange that Nelson Rockefeller ceased being a political force about the time Pitchford was about 9) is ultimately going to vote for.
Last Thursday I got a call from Pitchford. He had decided to vote for Obama on the day after the second Presidential debate, and having decided, had already cast his ballot in Ohio’s early-voting system. It was the financial crash that finally made up his mind, and especially an article in The Economist in which leading economists rated Obama’s program and advisers over McCain’s. This self-described libertarian found himself open to more government intervention in the market. “Where we’re sitting at now is such a scary spot that four years of McCain would be seen as the status quo with a tweak on it,” Pitchford said. “Change is suddenly looking pretty good.” I asked if the McCain-Palin effort to portray Obama as risky had had any effect on him. “Things are risky enough under the current Administration,” Pitchford said, “that they have no right to talk about risk.”
To make it easier for you liberal journalists out there, just take this story as your basic format and change the name of the name of the undecided voter. However, be sure to always keep Obama as the name for whom the "undecided voter" will always choose. Always. That is the one part of the story that never changes in these liberal MSM "undecided voter" stories.
Oh, and thanks to George Packer for at least not calling this "undecided voter" a "lifelong Republican."
