The Guadalajara Reporter

Voters in Mexico and the United States are reported by the media, and others, as being weary and disillusioned

The media in Mexico and the United States are noting that the electorates in both countries are “weary” of the narrowness of their national political discourse. In other words they are both cynical and bored with their politicians, the campaigns, their national political rhetoric and their meager political choices.

In Mexico, the presidential campaign theoretically doesn’t begin until next month. But already many voters are tired of the “pretty and hollow” candidate that the media has already baptized “the front runner” who will bring back to power the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), which ran the Republic with 71 years of open and insatiable corruption, brutality and rapacious guile.

In the United States the Republican party has carried out what seems to an increasing number of voters to be an endless series of debates (20 in all) which have not yet revealed a convincing favorite. Senator John McCain has called for an end to the debates, saying their negativism is harming the GOP, “driving up negative impressions of the party’s presidential candidates.” Many conservatives seem to agree that it’s not  “impressions,” but the truth about unelectable candidates. Something McCain’s disastrous experience with Sarah Palin evidently taught him. The debates have provided a raft of laughably outlandish, startlingly ignorant and depressingly intolerant would-be aspirants. The short-lived popularity of several offered opportunities to flourish their lack of qualifications. “Which one of these candidates would you want with his finger on the button for the bomb?” asked one columnist. The guy who believes Satan is aiming his pointed tail at the “soul wounds” of the U.S., meaning men and women who have sex for reasons other than procreation, women who work outside the home? That’s Rick Santorum, if you missed the quasi-Catholic mysticism.

A study has shown that 98 percent of sexually-active Catholic women tend to use contraceptives at the same rate as their non-Catholic counterparts. Not a few Catholics suggest that if Santorum wants to tinker with other people’s private lives, he should try to “clean up” his own parish before promoting legislation that would include everybody else.  But he doesn’t have a chance at that either.

In both nations, much of the electorate expresses a weariness that makes clear a dissatisfaction in a coming race between unreassuring choices.

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