Miss-Information

~ Laura

I feel slightly ill after watching this interview of people lining up to get a Palin autograph. The video is most disturbing, because of the level of misinformation about politics. One guy thought the president was going to impose martial law in a year or two.

When asked what they liked about Palin, her supporters pointed to values, such as freedom, fairness, realness, rather than to specific policies. To be fair, I'm sure that some people voted for Obama because they thought he was cool, rather than because of specific issues. However, Palin seems to have exploited this apolitical tendency in America by refusing to talk policy.

UPDATE: Really amazing debate about this book by Althouse and Goldberg on BloggingHeads. They fight! Ooooh. Both agree that Palin's beauty propelled her popularity.

I'm liking the spin-off discussions about American political culture and all that really interesting, rather than the discussions that are solely about Palin.

Published by Laura

8 thoughts on “Miss-Information”

  2. Yeah, well, go interview a crowd at an Al Sharpton rally, realize that they all vote Democratic, and report back on which is the stupider–more accurately, the less knowledgeable–political party. If democracy depended on politically knowledgeable voters, it would have collapsed long ago.

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  3. I forgot about this, but the Howard Stern show was on the job a year ago during the campaign. A Howard Stern employee went to Harlem and interviewed residents about why they were voting the way they did. The HS guy reversed the McCain and Obama positions, so he was asking people, are you voting for Obama because he’s pro-life or because he wants to keep troops in Iraq. The HS guy also asked if they were happy with Obama’s choice of Sarah Palin for VP and they all were. Interestingly, the lone black McCain supporter was similarly misinformed. Nobody had a clue as to the purported content of the presidential race.

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  4. y81 — your comment would only be relevant if Al Sharpton had been the Democratic vice presidential candidate. I believe that was never considered. A Jesse Jackson rally might be a more appropriate analogy (I doubt he was considered, either, but he at least won Democratic primaries).
    I am fascinated by these knowledge questions, but consider anecdotal interviews at rallies to be insufficient evidence to believe anything. I would love to see more quantitative studies, though, examining the level of knowledge among different political sub-populations. Some have been done and they’re interesting. One thing I think they all show is that the level of *most* subgroups is much lower than I expect.
    I don’t think this is new, though. I think government is a very complex system, and though democracy seems to be the only way to make decisions in it, that decision making has never been any more knowledgeable than it would be if we asked people to make their own decisions about their cancer treatments.

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  5. I agree that it’s scary and unpleasant, but do always try to keep in mind that such videos are not random samples. Anyone who was more sensible was edited out, I’d suppose. That said, what’s most disturbing to me is the false “factual” beliefs presented by many people- not just the implausible predictions, but the gross falsehoods (about abortion and Obama’s position on it, his citizenship, etc.)

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  6. bj–Al Sharpton was a Democratic presidential candidate in 2004. He appeared in the various Democratic presidential debates, won votes in primaries, received federal matching funds, etc. These are all things that Sarah Palin has never done. Have you forgotten all these things?
    It’s true that Jesse Jackson also ran for president, but that was much longer ago.

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  7. What was meant by this sentence? “Both agree that the only reason that Palin’s beauty has propelled her popularity.”

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  8. Sorry, writing too fast while watching children. The sentence should have read, “Both agree that Palin’s beauty propelled her popularity.”

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