The abundant ignorance of American voters (jawdropping stuff) [View All]

[depakid]

I've just watched two YouTube videos that should make anyone despair about the future of our republic.

This is bipartisan despair, mind you. One video is composed of interviews with Sarah Palin fans waiting in line to meet the "author" of Going Rogue at a Borders bookstore. The other video was shot on election day last year and features a group of Obama voters answering a set of political question to the best of their limited ability. See the Palin video http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mKKKgua7wQk">here and the Obama video http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I3ZLJj_q4xI">here and you'll understand what I'm talking about.

The Palin fans quickly reveal they haven't the slightest clue what policies the ex-Alaska governor would pursue if she becomes president, but they are eager to see her sitting behind the big desk in the Oval Office, nevertheless. One thing they all seem to agree on is that government spending needs to be stopped. The interviewer asks which particular spending they have in mind. "All of it," one woman emphatically replies. (Poof! There goes Medicare, the national parks and the War in Afghanistan.)

In any event, policy is not foremost in these people's minds. Fear is.

One man says America is no longer the beacon of the world. Another says partial birth abortions are sneaking back, thanks to Obama -- who, by the way, is not really an American citizen. A Christian woman says her rights to worship and speak freely are somehow being taken away. A worried fellow says Palin can't win the presidency in 2012 because Obama is giving citizenship to hordes of illegal aliens who will vote against her. He says the election may not be held, anyway. "I know there's some back room talk about martial law," he says, without specifying whose back room is filled with that particular conversation.

One man notes that Barack Obama wrote a couple of books, too, in which he laid out "exactly what he's going to do." And what would that be? "Marxism, Leninism, Socialism," the man replies with complete assurance that he is correct. The same guy later says, "If you're right, you don't have to compromise. Compromise is for people who are wrong."

While the Palinistas are filled with certainty about the misinformation they spout as fact, the Obama voters are just blissfully ignorant. The interviewer asks them to identify which party controls Congress. They all say the Republicans do. Then they almost all fail to identify Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid, the actual leaders of the actual majority caucuses in Congress. They don't know who Barney Frank is. They don't know who said what at various well-publicized moments in the campaign. The only bit of information they all know is that the candidate who got a new campaign wardrobe and had a pregnant teenage daughter was Sarah Palin.

Now, obviously, creators of both videos were coming from political perspectives that were the opposite of the views held by the people being interviewed, so some editing to emphasize the interviewees stupidity clearly took place. But I've seen enough man-in-the-street interviews and talked to enough voters to know that there was nothing all that misleading in either video. There is a disturbingly large number of our fellow citizens who pay very little attention to current events and, among those who claim to be paying attention, an alarming share of them think they are informing themselves when they buy into the latest paranoid fantasy that seeps in through the Internet or gets shouted in their ears by a talk radio raver.

More: http://blog.seattlepi.com/davidhorsey/archives/186517.asp