The enemy of the perfect

In a comment below, Pauli makes an interesting inference:

I think it is sad that "doing the lesser evil" has become euphemistic for choosing the better candidate or the best candidate. It reveals to me that when people say they are holding out for a good candidate, what they really want is a perfect candidate.

That may well be true in some cases.

As for me, I think it's sad that "choosing the lesser evil" has become euphemistic for choosing the better candidate because it makes it sound like choosing evil can be the right thing to do.

My guess, though, is that most people don't mean evil when they say they'll choose the lesser evil, they mean something like "badly flawed" or "lacking regnative prudence" (okay, so they wouldn't know they meant that). More concretely, they mean there's something they strongly dislike about each candidate, something that prevents them from voting for that candidate with enthusiasm (or at all).

I'd say there's a lot of room between a candidate like that and a perfect candidate.

Labels: faithful citizenship

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