ManicDDaily

Green is good. People like green.

I admit that I’ve done it.  Gone into a voting booth to vote for a presidential or mayoral nominee, and then, faced with a long list of unknown candidates for lesser offices, gone down the line flipping levers.   I admit too that the rationale of my lever flipping has sometimes been fairly random, or at worst, based on knee-jerk biases.  I used to, for example, go for the unknown women candidates, feeling certain, in the days before Sarah Palin, that increasing the number of women in politics was sure to be for the good.

In my defense, I’ve never voted randomly for a United States Senator.  Whatever you think of government, these people have power.  Whatever you think about politics, all politicians are not the same.

And now we have Alvin Greene, an unemployed vet, living in his father’s basement, with an obscenity charge against him, winning the Democratic primary by 60% in South Carolina.  This might not seem completely unusual if Alvin Greene were a talkative, attention-getting, barnstorming, issue-oriented kind of guy.  But in his first free media exposure,  he seems extremely taciturn and more than a bit evasive.

Some, wondering how Greene came up with the $10,000 filing fee, have suspected that he is a Republican “plant”.   A bigger question, it seems to me, is how he won 60% of the vote .

I suspect that  both political operatives and marketing executives are studying this one.  What about Greene lured voters?  Could it just be dislike of his opponent, Victor Rawl?  But did the voters, who seemed to know nothing about Greene, know enough about Rawls to kick him out?  (No one’s mentioned any major scandals—only that Rawl has been in Congress for several terms.)

Were voters basing their votes on race?  Did they know the candidates’ race?

Jon Stewart, in a pretty hilarious skit on the Daily Show, suggests the victory arose from the alphabetical order of the names.  Greene was first on the ballot.

Then, there’s the benefit of a color name.  People like color names—there is something innocuous, common, unthreatening about them. On the same Daily Show discussing Alvin Greene, Stewart had unrelated segments about Robert Green, the British goalie in the U.K.-U.S. World Cup game, and Betty White.

And, frankly, if you have a color name, green is a good one—the color of money AND the environment.  (Granted, it may be slightly less good after the U.K.-U.S. soccer match, but it is unlikely that that game had any impact on the South Carolina primary.)

Then, of course, there are the echoes of popular music—the singer Al Green v. the singer Lou Rawls.  In my mind, Al Green wins that contest hands down.  (“I am so in love with you” sounds a lot better to my ears than “you’ll never find another lover like me.”)

Green (Al)  is also alive, unlike Rawls (Lou), and has recently become a very good gospel singer.

Keep in mind, that I am not saying that Alvin Greene may not be a good guy, just that no one seems to know.

I, for one, am going to be a lot more careful in the future to leave all unknown levers unturned