Editorial: You can’t blame ‘em
Few voters pay any attention to party platforms, a nationwide Gallup Poll reports. Fewer than two in five persons claim to have read any part of the Republican platform – which was the only one that had been made public when the poll was taken. Readers of the Democratic platform may be more numerous due to the fact that it was so much shorter than the Republican.
Here is an issue on which an editorial writer should be properly outraged and aggrieved – a plain dereliction of duty, a disregard of the obligations of democracy, a callous indifference toward the responsibilities of citizenship.
But, somehow, we can’t. We are inclined to feel that three out of five persons have merely escaped the platitudes, straddling and doubletalk which go to make up party platforms.
Of course, that isn’t the right view – because if more people paid attention to platforms, the politicians might treat them with greater respect and care. But, things being what they are this year and have been in many previous campaign years, who are we to blame the poor citizen who escapes the boredom and insincerity of the party platform by the simple expedient of not reading it?