INDY'S WEEKLY ALTERNATIVE NEWSPAPER HIGHLIGHTING ARTS, ENTERTAINMENT AND SOCIAL JUSTICE

Indiana loves to be wrong

Once again, Indiana proved itself to be on the wrong side of history with its vote in the Democratic primary last week.

That itself is nothing new. Indiana has a long history of choosing exactly the wrong candidate in any given election. We were the very first states to go for George W. Bush in 2000 and 2004. And for Bob Dole, Bush, Reagan, Ford and Nixon before that.

Let’s just face it. We suck when it comes to picking presidents. I bet if Indiana were given a chance of bringing two presidents back from the dead and Abraham Lincoln and Calvin Coolidge were squaring off, Hoosiers would go for Cool Cal if Coolidge promised to rebuild I-465.

We’re the Jennifer Lopez of states: every few years we marry the wrong person for us and then dump them just as quickly.

This year, the collective intelligence of Indiana decided that it was a better idea to vote for a candidate who was in the last days of her campaign, with no realistic chance of winning, with no real plan for the future and who was so broke that she had to loan herself millions of dollars so she could buy TV ads during Jerry Springer broadcasts.

Good call, Indiana.

Hillary Clinton’s narrow win in Indiana keeps alive our winning streak of choosing the worst candidate. And you can bet that even if John McCain comes out for slavery or for heroin for schoolchildren, we’ll still give him a majority of our votes come November.

There’s something comforting about knowing your home state can be trusted to always back the loser. It’s the same kind of feeling you get when you visit an elderly relative who’s always talking about the unions destroying America. They’re so wrong that it’s cute.

You have to realize several things about Indiana. We elected Mitch Daniels, the former federal budget director, as our governor even after it was known that he took record budget surpluses and turned them into record deficits.

In other words, when we were offered arguably the worst-performing government official ever, a majority of us picked him. Why? He had an RV and pretended to sound like a smalltown Hoosier.

And this year, when the worst budget director has transformed himself into possibly the worst governor ever, many of us seem inclined to support him again. Why? He drives around in an RV and pretends to sound like a good old boy.

It doesn’t make sense unless you think about it this way: We like to choose the worst candidate. We want to hold the world record for being the most wrong for the longest period of time. We’re proud of it.

Hoosiers aren’t stupid people. Many of us have achieved at least a high school diploma and some of us have even been to one or two college classes. We just enjoy playing the devil’s advocate and going for the least qualified candidate.

Therefore, it makes perfect sense that a narrow majority of us picked the one presidential candidate with absolutely no chance of winning the nomination, much less the general election. We wouldn’t have it any other way. We just like to be wrong.