Schrodinger's Ass

"Ass" as in "Donkey".

"Donkey" as in "Democrat".

"Schrodinger" as in the pioneering quantum-mechanics theorist.

He created the following thought experiment, commonly referred to as "Schrodinger's Cat" (among people who commonly refer to such things), to illustrate an important idea known as a "superposition" :

A cat is placed in a windowless box along with a vial of poison gas. The vial will perhaps open, and thus kill the cat, based on some unpredictable random mechanism. (We can safely infer from this set-up that Schrodinger was more of a dog-person, and, more worrisomely, was German.)

Since, without looking, we have no way of knowing whether or not the random process opened the vial at any given time, the only way to determine the health of the cat is to open the box. Until we open the box, the cat is, for all practical purposes, both alive and dead. The cat is said to be in a "superposition" of states, both thriving and deceased at the same time. When we overcome our revulsion at Kitty's Edgar Allen Poe-like predicament and peek inside, the cat is said to "collapse" into one of the two states.

Which brings us to the Democrats.

Polls show that a generic, unidentified Democratic candidate will beat a Republican in a huge number of races around the country. The same was true of the last presidential election. Let's call this unidentified candidate "Schrodinger's Ass" since they are in a superposition of positions. All that's known about them is that they aren't Republican.

Are they for or against the war? Are they socially and economically liberal or conservative? Are they centrist or progressive? We can't know until we name a real, live candidate and they collapse into a specific set of policies.

Understandably many Democrats have tried mightily to retain the enviable qualities of superpositionality all the way through election day. A vague policy position allows individual voters to project their hopes and priorities onto a candidate, but a strong and clear position that delights one group will permanently alienate another. But this is no way to run a campaign or a country.

Leadership, a word whose modern usage I generally loathe for its meaningless, high-school athletic awards-dinner banality, but which is actually required in this context, demands specificity. This is the genius of turn-of-the-century Republicans. They have constructed a clear platform and demanded and received loyalty from their entire rank-and-file, no matter how at odds individual Republicans might be with specific parts of the platform.

Democrats, such as the terrifyingly unapologetic mindless progressives whose Nader votes handed Bush the 2000 election, may well be too ornery to engage in such herd behavior, but they have to try.

The only alternative is for the candidates to run for their various offices silently and with Unknown Comic-style paper bags over their heads. Maybe they can even change the election laws so they can list themselves on the ballot as "Generic Democrat". But that begs the question of what the hell they'll do if they actually manage to get elected, because superpositional cats can't chase mice or play with string, much less deal with a nuclear weapons wielding Iran.