What's it all about, Alfie?

Link from a post by Gashwin took me to this great observation by Christopher Hitchen of the Times UK Online:

IN EVERY election cycle there is a dispute among pundits and between candidates as to precisely what the election is “about”. The results can then be analysed according to how they provide a verdict on this topic, or topics.

There is usually more than one “about” about, and sometimes the “abouts” are related. In the past US presidential contest [2004] there was general agreement that the dispute between the candidates was “about” Iraq, but also “about” the relative military qualifications, in the late 1960s, of the two contenders. For a while, though this requires an effort of memory, it was also “about” the right of homosexual couples to marry.

The present US midterm election campaign, however, is principally “about” the fact that federal law mandates a vote in November, and thus that there have to be candidates, issues, spending contests and all the rest of it.

For THIS we get four weeks of political ads?

Hitchens' description of the George Allen race (Freudian??) shows how far afield from serious the "about" can be:

Now he is in the deepest of trouble because — let me see if I have this right — he isn't “really” from the South, wears cowboy boots though there are no cowboys in Virginia, made a cryptic remark to a questioner from the Indian sub-continent and reacted oddly to the news of his mother’s hidden Jewish parentage.

Here in the 1st state to exit the Union, we have someone who drives too fast vs. someone supporting cock-fighting; a millionaire son of a state icon pretending to have created his own success vs. someone who quite literally has been asleep on the job; etc.

And the locals didn't even let the Governor vote! (Their error ... he was able to vote later on.)