The kids in red are making me red and giving me the blues

For the last two weeks, the corner of 19th and M has been overrun with over-enthusiastic recent college grad-aged kids in red DNC shirts, asking everyone who walks by, "Would you like to help get George Bush out of the White House?" They're making my life miserable. I can't go get lunch or buy a CD or get an ill-advised caramel apple muffin without being asked if I would like to help get George Bush out of the White House. I live in constant annoyance of them. I walked a block out of my way just to avoid them.

I think it's a bad question to be asking. I know they think that they're trying to capitalize on Bush's increasing unpopularity, but I think that focusing on getting Bush out of the White House rather than getting Kerry in is a really flawed tactic. Sooner or later, undecided voters are going to compare and contrast the two, and if the DNC's tactic has just been "Bush bad", then people are going to eventually going to ask, "But what's good, then?" It's been conventional political wisdom for a very long time: don't give voters a choice between an known evil and an unknown, especially if "evil" is still leading in the polls.

But even besides the flawed politics, they're just annoying, and they don't have to be. One or two days of it, fine. But they've been there for TWO WEEKS. I've never voted for anyone but Democrats in my entire voting career and if they're pissing me off, I can't imagine how irritated the undecided voters and questioning Republicans in this neighborhood are getting. All they have to do is make sure they're not in one spot for longer than two or three days and then move on (Ha! Get it?! Move on?!) to another street corner. They're driving me crazy and they need to leave.

For a while, I joked that I was going to respond, "If you ask me one more time, I'm voting for George Bush." But they've annoyed me enough that I don't think I'll be voting for Kerry. While something really catastrophic would have to happen for me to even consider voting for Bush, these little campaigners have made my vote almost definite: I'm voting for Nader.