Politics in the Swing State

If there was one thing that I could not stay away from during this trip to the States was the election. Everywhere we went, there were TVs showing news about the election. When we were in the hotel, there were TVs in the lobby and TVs by the elevators that talked about the election all the time. The airport was the same and even at the foodcourt, there would be a TV at the centre showing the news while all the vendors would have their TV tuned to the same channel. When we get into our hotel rooms, out of about 10 channels we can receive, half of them were news about the election.

You would think that with all of this publicity, everyone would be talking about it, but apparently the answer is no. While we were around the city, we saw a few Obama stickers in cabs and what not, but we didn't see much advertisement signs in people's front lawns. It almost feel like the election is really outside of their concerns. I figured since Ohio is a swing state, there would be much more action going on! Maybe we were just outside the range of the talk, which was right smack in the middle of downtown of the state capital. The dichotomy was quite strange.

However, the question seemed to be answered when we were at the Conference and all the Americans we met told us that all the non-Americans they've met know more about American politics than they do. Dr. George Grinstein, who organizes the conference, told us that you never hear students in his school talk about politics because people just dont think it's something to talk about.

He also believes that a part of this reason is because as American citizens, they are censored. He tells us that if you were to watch the news on TV, a lot of the stuff that's bad for the government gets censored it. Case-in-point: he says that Kennedy had ordered the assassination of Fidel Castro at least three times and everyone around the world knew about it, but this information was censored for Americans. Apparently, if you want real news about America, you gotta go read BBC online.

Since Dr. Grinstein's field is visualizing data, he calculated and visualized the American economy based on the GDP and told everyone at lunch that 8 months ago, they each owed a couple thousand dollars (8?), now they each owe something like eighty thirty-two thousand dollars. He believes that the last eight years, America and its reputation was destroyed. He is set that McCain gets elected, he's going to take his family and his research grants with him and move to either France, Montreal, Toronto, or BC. It's really crazy to listen to someone like him talk about American politics. He seems to think that America is on the verge of its demise--even DoD is starting to worry about the mass emmigration out of the States into Canada will cause severe brain drain in the event that the Republicans win again. Is it really that bad?

Here's one for kicks: