WaPo's Dan Balz bawls about low turnout in "Everyone says turnout is key. So why does it keep going down?"

Boring!

I don't mean Balz is boring, though, of course, he is.

I mean hooray for boredom in politics.

It's healthy. These people who are incessantly trying to excite us about politics should feel horribly frustrated by our boredom. Our nonresponsiveness to their proddings and ticklings is the best thing we've got. No amount of money spent on advertising can move us. We've seen it all, and we've got lives to live.

Some people don't arrive at enough of an opinion to want to add their tiny bit of weight to one side as their fellow citizens determine which candidate wins. Their nonparticipation has meaning that deserves respect. There are innumerable reasons for nonparticipation, and one should not presume that the abstainers are lazy or numb. They may defer to the opinions of others. They may dislike all the candidates. They may think the candidates are similar enough that it's not worth putting time into teasing out the differences. They may have other things to do with that time. Better things.

We were talking about boredom in politics yesterday in this post about Hillary. Buzzfeed's Ben Smith had been musing about whether Hillary! could get women jazzed up about women!!! and in lust for seeing a — first!!!! — Woman President. And I said:

I'm sick of inspiration and claims of historiosity. We should all be perfectly jaded by now. Inoculated. It's healthful and wholesome. And so what if watching the campaign day by day is "a boring, grinding affair"? 

The quoted words were Smith's.

That's a problem for Smith, running his buzz-dependent website, but it's a nonproblem for the rest of us. Think of the time you can save not reading the websites that try to make something out of the presidential campaign every damned day. What will you do with all that time? Instead of thinking about how what happened in the last hour might be history, you could, for example, read history. May I recommend the Amity Shlaes biography of Calvin Coolidge?

Coolidge was boring. Good boring. Let's be boring for a change. I want a boring President. Stop trying to excite me.

In the comments, Freeman Hunt wrote:

I have paid much attention to these elections in the past, and I see no difference that my attention has made. I therefore plan to devote very little attention to this election until it is time to vote. At that time, I will select the most boring, competent person who aligns with what I'd like to see done.

The End.

I've started a new tag: I'm for Boring. Like Freeman, I do vote, but I'm not voting because someone has excited me, and I don't think I ever have, now that I think of it. And I don't want other people to get excited. If that means they don't even vote, I respect that. Thanks for not getting excited and impulse voting. Politics should be boring. I want the government to be boring.

In the comments yesterday, cubanbob said:

I could be wrong but it seems you are hoping for Scott Walker for president. No one ever called him Mister Excitement and he does appear to be reasonably competent and law abiding....

And I said:

Walker excited the hell out of people around here.

I think Romney is nicely boring. Bring him back. That would be especially boring.

And John Althouse Cohen said...

Maybe the Democratic nominee should be someone who may not be the most exciting politician...

John linked here:

She reasoned "because he is removing all elements of contest and struggle from Germany. By driving out the Jews and the democratic and Left elements, he is driving out everything that conduces to activity. That means peace."

That quote appears in a May 6, 1934 NYT article so beautifully written that I searched the Times website to find more by its author, Lansing Warren. I found the obituary published in 1987, when he died at the age of 93:

In 1926, Edwin L. James, the Paris bureau chief of The New York Times, hired him...

In November 1942, Mr. Warren and his wife were arrested by the Nazis, along with other American correspondents, consular officers and Red Cross workers. The Warrens were held in Lourdes and later in Baden-Baden, Germany. To stave off boredom, the prisoners organized a ''university'' in which some taught and others studied. Thanks to a sharp memory and a few English books, Mr. Warren taught English literature. He studied Italian.

"By politicians' standards, Obama projected feline indifference to the adoration he engendered. Biden reached for every hand, shoulder, and head."

From "The Biden Agenda" (in The New Yorker). And from the same article:

After Obama's disastrously muted performance in a debate against Romney, the Vice-President prepared to face his counterpart, Paul Ryan, the then forty-two-year-old Wisconsin congressman, who has the eyes of a foal. Onstage, Biden wore a lupine grin.

Smoke, smoking, second-hand smoke, lung, lungs, children, minors.

The word "minor" does appear:

There is honest debate among scientists about the health effects of marijuana, but we believe that the evidence is overwhelming that addiction and dependence are relatively minor problems, especially compared with alcohol and tobacco.

Oh, don't worry about the scientists! It's what you believe that really matters.

IN THE COMMENTS: Mark observes that the words "adolescent" and "under 21" do appear in the article. He's right. It's this one paragraph:

There are legitimate concerns about marijuana on the development of adolescent brains. For that reason, we advocate the prohibition of sales to people under 21. 

First, that doesn't address the problem of second-hand smoke imposed on others including children.

Second — and much more hilariously — it exhibits the very faith in prohibition that most of the editorial finds ineffectual and damaging and even racist. The title of the editorial is "Repeal Prohibition, Again." The main point is that prohibition doesn't work! How, then, is prohibition supposed to work on the under-21 crowd? These are the very people who are most enthusiastic about using marijuana and least likely to absorb and respond to the consequences of committing crimes. They have "adolescent brains" after all.

Third, why are "people" over 18 but under 21 lumped in with adolescents? If their brains are so badly underdeveloped, let's repeal the 26th Amendment. A better proposal would be to lower the drinking age to 18. If the Times is as concerned as it purports to be about young people getting a criminal record that messes up their lives, how about relieving them of that ridiculous burden? Instead, the Times would usher in a new era of 21-and-over people free to puff away on marijuana, while the younger people — the ones who most want to have a go at wrecking their heads and their lungs — get shunted into the black market.

Fourth, obviously, there will still be an illegal market. The under-21 people will demand it.

For an intelligent, in-depth analysis of the reality of marijuana legalization, read Patrick Radden Keefe's great New Yorker article "Buzzkill/Washington State discovers that it's not so easy to create a legal marijuana economy." I know the NYT has a whole series of editorials on the subject planned, but so far, its presentation of the subject is exasperatingly unsophisticated. I might well go along with legalization as the better policy, but the Times approach is, to me, devoid of persuasiveness.