Thursday, October 28, 2010

"Ornery voters" full of "elite-phobia"

Walt still has his umbrella up to deflect the fallout from Monday's municipal elections in Toronto. An interesting column appears in today's Globe and Mail in which pollster Frank Graves (the one who said it was the vizmins wot won it for Ford) is quoted thus: "The electorate is 'newly elite-phobic' [but] it’s not clear whether the 'ornery-voter landscape' will be sustained."

Mr. Graves gets Walt's Master of Fuzzispeak prize for this week for creating not one but two pieces of jargon, which will probably be repeated ad nauseam by other pundits, and of course mangled and chewed to death by TV's talking heads.

Still, Walt likes the sound of those words, especially "ornery voters". Some will see a similarity between "ornery" and "ordinary". And that's the whole political story, in Canada and the USA, at this moment in time. [No more jargon, please. Ed.] The ordinary people have gotten ornery. Good on `em.

As for "elite-phobia", I think what this means is that the ordinary people have grown tired of being told by the chattering classes not just what to do (and not do), but what to think. So we -- I'm including myself -- have risen up on our hind feet to say "Piss on you! I'm going to do what I think is right!" Good on us!

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