All Posts Tagged With: "voter"

It’s truly a sad (and pathetic) commentary on the American voter. Kathleen Hall Jamieson and Brooks Jackson at FactCheck.org examine the phenomenon of disinformed voters:

We saw more aggressive fact-checking by journalists in this election than ever before. Unfortunately, as a post-election Annenberg Public Policy Center poll confirms, millions of voters were bamboozled anyway.

• More than half of U.S. adults (52 percent) said the claim that Sen. Barack Obama’s tax plan would raise taxes on most small businesses is truthful, when in fact only a small percentage would see any increase.

• More than two in five (42.3 percent) found truth in the claim that Sen. John McCain planned to “cut more than 800 billion dollars in Medicare payments and cut benefits,” even though McCain made clear he had no intent to cut benefits.

The first falsehood was peddled to voters by McCain throughout his campaign, and the second was made in a pair of ads run heavily in the final weeks of the campaign by Obama.

These aren’t isolated examples. One in four (25.6 percent) of those who earned too little to have seen any tax increase under Obama’s plan nevertheless believed that he intended to “increase your own federal income taxes,” accepting McCain’s repeated claims that “painful” tax hikes were being proposed on “families.” Nearly two in five (39.8 percent) thought McCain had said he would keep troops in combat in Iraq for up to 100 years, though he’d actually spoken of a peacetime presence such as that in Japan or South Korea. Close to one in three (31 percent) believed widely disseminated claims that Obama would give Social Security or health care benefits to illegal immigrants, when in fact he would do neither.

We’re not surprised. As we wrote in “unSpun: finding facts in a world of disinformation,” the same thing happened in 2004 when majorities of voters believed untrue things that had been fed to them by the Bush and Kerry campaigns Continued

Tags: 2008 election, Annenberg Public Policy Center, beliefs, Brooks Jackson, disinformed, electorate, FactCheck.org, false beliefs, Ignorance, ignorant, Kathleen Hall Jamieson, political ads, Politics, voter

[Stepping up onto my soapbox.]

Who is to blame for the wrong track that 81 percent of Americans believe this country is on? For everything that seems to be going wrong — the endless war, the faltering economy, out-of-control federal spending, ineffectual government — who can we point our finger at?

The American electorate should look no further than the mirror. We are the enablers that have helped make this happen. Our leaders are (at least in theory) elected. They didn’t get their job by coup, by inheritance (although the Bushes and Clintons are certainly trying to make the presidency a dynastic one), or by appointment by the ruling elite (ignoring the inordinate influence of Corporate America). They are in office because we, the American electorate, put them there.

The world was astonished that after the first four years of this administration and its disastrous policies that we would put them back into office for another four years. The Daily Mirror‘s famous cover the day after Bush was re-elected captured the international reaction: “How can 59,054,087 people be so DUMB?” I couldn’t have agreed more.

To quote the president: “There’s an old saying in Tennessee — I know it’s in Texas, probably in Tennessee — that says, fool me once, shame on — shame on you. Fool me — you can’t get fooled again.” (This quote has more impact when you watch it.)

How could nearly 60 million voters re-elect a failed president? I still shake my head to this day. But, I find myself increasingly unsympathetic when some of those who voted for the president complain about our predicament today. I confess that I voted for George W. Bush in 2000… “fool me once.” I didn’t make that mistake again. For those of us who were fooled a second time, “shame on me.” Continued