The Primar-mageddon

I learned on CNN this morning (they repeated about 6 times in case I missed it at any point) that Newt Gingrich called the SC primary the "armageddon" of the race in his interview last night with Piers Morgan.  As in, everyone is pulling out all the stops, a crazy amount of money is being spent, etc etc.  It's all or nothing.  Or at least, that's what Newt has decided.  In this one, very specific instance, I wish he were right.  Unfortunately, Ron Paul is calling Florida the real decider, Perry won't be satisfied until he's lost every Southern state, and Huntsman is going to need the race to move back North again before he declares defeat.  We're in for several maybe-geddons.  And of course, we all love the drama of it, and all the speculation that we're just praying will be totally wrong.


So this is the point I'm slowly ambling up to: I wish prognostications about voting patterns were more wrong.  I wish newspapers with incorrect headlines were practically an annual pattern.  Pundits are often wrong about who exactly is going to win, but they seem to get voting patterns scarily correct.  Young people vote this way, old people vote that way, Christians vote this way, Jews vote that way.  And I think we all want them to be wrong.  After all, I am a young person, and if you listened to pundits you would think my top issues are education loans, the environment and vodka-soaked tampons (ok, I'm a little old for the last one...we moved on to whiskey.  Classier.)  Those are, in fact, not at all my top issues.  And yet I can't seem to stop voting how they tell me young people vote.  Most Jewish people I know (my mother included) care about more issues than Israel.  And yet, as a block, you wouldn't know it.


Today, also on CNN, I saw this pastor from a megachurch in La Mesa, CA talking about how he was publicly endorsing Newt Gingrich (and apparently had done so from the pulpit) because he was the only candidate who cared about the "foundational Christian issues".  Turns out these things are abortion and gay rights.  Funny, I thought he was going to say, "caring for the poor" or "social justice".  Don't know why I would imagine such a thing.


Anyway, apparently a bunch of evangelical leaders are getting together tomorrow to discuss who they are going to collectively endorse.  And obviously this is going to lead to pundits deciding how evangelicals as a whole are going to vote.  It seemed like in the past few years, we had finally moved away from this "religious right" domination, where Christians could care about all kinds of issues and vote in different ways and still be part of that "evangelical base". I hope that's still true.


Come on evangelicals, in all those Southern Primarmageddon states, give us a "Dewey Defeats Truman" moment.  Or at least, please don't vote for Gingrich.  Seriously.