Missing the Point

I try not to descend the spiral staircase of futility into political discussions as much anymore, but I was truly disappointed by this quote from an article about Carly Fiorina's unpaid debts from her failed Senate campaign:

"People are just upset and angry and throwing her under the bus," said Jon Cross, Fiorina's operations director for her Senate campaign. "If we didn't win, why do you deserve to get paid? If you don't succeed in business, you shouldn't be the first one to step up and complain about getting paid."

I'm sure that this operations director would say the same thing to his loan shark if he borrowed a million dollars and then bet it all on RG III surviving more than two Redskins games without injury, and I'm sure the loan shark would shrug and proclaim, "You win some and lose some, buddy!" before going out for beers and hugs. That's obviously how the real world works.

I've never run for office, mainly because none of the job descriptions interest me (until someone creates an elected office for Czar of Eliminating Autotune from Popular Music). However, even I can smell the ridiculousness of assuming that losing your campaign equates to a Get Out of Jail Free card on your invoiced goods and services. Unless all of the companies that provided services to the campaign were actually operating as unpaid interns given pizza and bus fares, this sounds like a matter for a collections agency.

Regardless of Fiorina's political positions or whether she was an angel or a demon as HP CEO, the fact that she and her operatives don't recognize the significance of this issue is more telling than the issue itself. I have the same disappointment over Hillary Clinton's flippant "Like with a cloth or something?" line about server wiping -- she can (and obviously does) have her own opinion on the controversy, but by dismissing it the way she is, she's implicitly dismissing the concerns of all potential voters for whom it's still a problem, and going further by deeming those concerns to be illegitimate.

Belittling the electorate is a pretty tone-deaf way of showing that you'll listen to them once you're in office. Feel free to prove to me that any given controversy is not a big deal, but don't try to tell me what I should and should not deem important.

It's like rechanneling an argument by telling everyone to calm down. Everyone here's already calm and you're being patronizingly smug. WHY DON'T YOU SMUG DOWN!