The Case for Not Voting in November

Dispatches from one nauseating presidential primary

By Chris Faraone, Mark Grueter and Dan McCarthy

While you were sleeping like a dead baby at 4am last Friday morning, three of us crammed into a rental car and hurtled up I-93. We brought laptops, long johns, stimulants and skepticism -- all the necessary tools for documenting New Hampshire's notorious first-in-the-nation presidential primary and the carnival that surrounds it. Initially, we came for the same reason that we cover local politics: because by delivering anti-partisan commentary with some stank on it, we believe that even intellectually retarded hipsters and college kids who wonder why a Middle Eastern city named itself after a drinking game might be interested in the policies and people who govern them. But after four days of chowing bullshit and baloney, we decided that you're all better off not voting. If you're a status quo robot who wants press release-inspired rub about flip-flops, hollow promises and poll results, then please consult your daily newspaper. For the rest of you lazy fucks who need new excuses for not exercising your democratic duty, this is the only article that you need to read all year.

They've turned the word "change" into a cliché. Our candidates reveal total contempt for us by endlessly repeating the same meaningless slogans every cycle; the contenders all declare support for "change" (we tracked how many times this word was abused until we ran out of ink) and other vague notions such as "hope." All of this rhetoric should be denounced, but instead we are expected to decide whose crap smells best. Barack Obama busts the same junk that John Kerry did in '04: "change," "unity" and all that mindless tripe. But our new guy has alleged "rock star" appeal, so we're compelled to soullessly embrace nonsense because he has a solid chance of winning. In desperate hope for victory, sheeple are swallowing candidates' vapid focus group advice, and such pathetic subjugations should be opposed on all fronts.

Fred Thompson is no savior. He's the Wesley Clark of this race -- a comparison he earned by galloping in on a Trojan horse stuffed with half-cocked ideals and unwarranted egomaniacal one-liners. We all support the Law and Order franchise, but unless Ice-T is running that's no reason to elect someone president. If you're a sucker for celebrity appeal, and you really feel the need to pull a lever on November 4, then John McCain is a much better pick. In addition to that whole prisoner of war thing he has going, McCain also looks like Dan Aykroyd's character in Nothing But Trouble. We suspect that Dennis Kucinich would consider appointing super hunk Viggo Mortensen to a considerable cabinet post, but despite the Ohio congressman's being one of the few candidates in either party who is genuinely interested in engineering social equality, he's been written off as delusional.

Mitt Romney's tan is artificial. And so is everything he says. Sure, he'll stack his administration with cute blond nitwits like he did on Beacon Hill, but that's only a perk for the security guards who monitor the White House bathroom surveillance cameras. After covering Mitt in Massachusetts for three years, we were looking forward to ignoring him the way he did the Commonwealth for his entire term. So imagine our frustration when he decided to crisscross America advertising the irresponsible unfunded health care mandate that come tax season will leave us not only still vulnerable, but a few hundred bucks broker. You can fool some of the people most of the time, and those are the chumps who Romney has had success preying on. Judging by the Patagonia-and-khaki decked turds at his New Hampshire rallies, it's mostly clueless yuppies and other assorted selfish jerkoffs who gravitate to Mitt's optimistic economic babble, family junk and racist anti-immigration fluff. Prove that you're not one of them by staying home on Election Day.

Our electoral process creates a hysterical intolerance of dissent. We went to the Puritan Backroom Restaurant on Saturday to watch the debates with Mike Huckabee supporters, and while we expected virgin punch and a dangerous tribe of Christians, it turned out to be an enlightening Republican debate bash at which we could trade opinions with the bunch. And then Ron Paul was asked about the War on Terror. As the Hucksters booed Paul's criticisms of American foreign policy, we stood up and cheered, only to be reminded that we were across enemy lines. Even those who disagree with Ron Paul should appreciate his contrarian stabs, but Republicans prefer an echo chamber, like Sunday night's Fox News debate that Ron Paul was excluded from.

America is not a real democracy. Money has completely corrupted our politics, which is why we have the lowest voter turnout of any industrialized country. It's not that most Americans are indifferent to political issues; it's that we don't even necessarily get to choose whether or not we participate in what can best be described as transparent fraud. For starters, it's pointlessly difficult and tedious to register and vote. Unlike those in peculiar civilized European countries, our election days are not holidays, so many people simply can't vote because they have to work. Voting isn't supposed to be for everybody; they just make it look that way. Here in New Hampshire, campaign events are staged for the cameras. Hillary Clinton holds a "rally" in the small cafeteria of a Hampton high school (rather than in, say, the gymnasium) so that it will look jam-packed on the 10 o'clock news. Her handlers, paid to manufacture frenzied momentum, opened the auditorium for the citizens that otherwise would have been denied entrance, piping Clinton's speech in over speakers. The phony democratic politics that prevail every campaign cycle.

Chuckabee. Judge Reinhold's endorsement of Bill Richardson runs a distant second to the Chuck Norris-Mike Huckabee tag team. Their union put a choke-hold on every crowd they faced, and we sat at several star-dipped rallies watching voters suck Huck's puck just because it came with Chuck. It's eerie when a presidential frontrunner gains noticeable steam by billing himself as the undercard on a B actor's ticket, but we expected nothing more from a party whose greatest hero was a Tinseltown side note. If Huck goes the distance, Chuck will be VP. And while that might make for one fuck of a Chuck-Huck T-shirt, you're better off using the 10 minutes that it would take you to vote at your local precinct to cast your third ballot in the upcoming American Idol contest.

You don't have to be sexist and/or racist to reject Clinton and Obama. Bill Clinton impressed us so much with his speech at Bow High School that we fancied his wife was a committed public servant. Only after escaping his aura did we remember that she's a megalomaniacal carpetbagger who's determined to buy this election like she did her New York Senate seat. Hillary's declining popularity in New Hampshire might be due to the aggressive presence of armed guards and police dogs at her campaign events, but those of you outside the Granite State only need to resent her shameless yap. As for Obama -- the candidate of tolerance -- we thought you should know that his staffers don't allow people to bring homemade signs to his events. Sorry if you registered to vote for the first time because you were inspired by his rainbow coalition of supporters with multicolored placards tagged with hopeful messages; every one was painted by an intern.

Manchester matters. This place is ground zero for the primaries, which is both an unfortunate reality and an easy metaphor for the entire flawed electoral system. The mills that didn't collapse from neglect were favorites for squatters and addicts before the recent overhaul. The gilded theaters were bulldozed and replaced with parking lots and dive bars. To its credit, Manchester is a historically relevant working-class mill town that was once a cultural and industrial epicenter, but as a stage on which candidates' performances mean everything, this city's role as a political epicenter is a punchline to a depressing joke. Every four years this silly circus stops here, and the clowns never consider how using this so-called "Queen City" as a litmus test is just another exercise in meaningless tradition.

On the ride home, we didn't listen to Tom Finneran hack it up on WRKO. By unanimous decision, the crew also vetoed NPR icon Tom Ashbrook's cynical half-stepping. Besides not caring who won, the car was already littered with Bud Light cans, expired Newports and Burger King Italian Chicken wrappers, and even with the nipple-jerking New England breeze ripping through the windows, the thought of smelling any radio blowhard's breath was sickening. We had endured pollsters, talking heads and barstool strategists making irrelevant predictions all week, so instead of torturing ourselves we bumped some Tupac and rubbed our own crystal ball. Here's what we saw: one candidate or another wins in November, and thousands of American soldiers will still be sacrificing life, wife and limb to stick band-aids around the Middle East. You or someone who you know and love will still be poor, uninsured and about to be foreclosed on. Gas prices will be high, morale will be low and no one will take responsibility. Especially us, because no matter which ticket prevails, we will not have voted for it.