Well, it's been a quiet week in Puddle Soonbegone, on the edge of karst country. I got a call on my answering machine when I got home last night, from my opposite number asking me to vote for the Glorious Mirrorball. Interesting presentation, a good deal more tribal & demanding than our approach, which emphasizes the merit of our candidates over any direct request for the recipient's vote. I'm divided over whether their approach is tactically more effective. The professionals say that you do need to actually straight-out ask for the voter's vote, explicitly. We tend to talk about "support" rather than baldly laying out the v-word.

It's not a happy thing, calling and interrupting private lives for tiny fragments, which put together into the whole, might possibly add up into some sort of transient public advantage - if everybody down the line has done the right thing, maybe. I suppose it's simpler if you hold some sort of corporatist or collectivist ideal: that it's the duty of the vanguard to lead the proletariat, or something about the masses uniting to throw of the shackles of etcetera, or the soul of the nation uniting to throw off the chains of international capitalism. Fascists are, after all, ideologically better suited to harassing the common man into dropping his private concerns and concentrating on the wider arena. To the individualist, what they were doing before you called them *is* the proper and right use of what little time they have. Any possible cause to which you might direct their precious time and attention will be, at best, of secondary importance.

This is why these campaign seasons should be sharp, furious, and above all, short. It's just a shame that it takes so long to get a GOTV operation up to speed. There's no such thing as a running start.

I tried listening to the AM station in town. AM radio is so low-tech, and kind of hard to listen to. There's all that atmospheric buzz, and the ads are mostly schmuckbait for goldbugs, far as I can tell.