Mitt did it?
Public Policy Polling has a robo based poll making the rounds yesterday with this question (15) and responses:
Q15 Who do you think deserves more credit for the killing of Osama bin Laden: Barack Obama or Mitt Romney?
Barack Obama……..63%
Mitt Romney……… 6%
Not sure ………. 31%
The breakdown looks like this:
Choosing Mitt is beyond me….’not sure’ might involve George Bush, but if memory serves he declared it ‘unimportant’ sometime in 2008. No matter one’s view on the matter, REALLY?
Most polls seem to be the “punch a number on the phone” variety, and between the small numbers on the phone and the slow pace of the
robo-caller i usually end up punching random numbers or hanging up.
Don’t take polling too seriously.
Rachel Maddow reported on this a couple nights ago
Note the 15% number for Mitt among Republicans.
Plus, just about half of them say “not sure.”
I don’t think Rusty’s random punch hypothesis holds up. The party differences are too stark. Rachel said she hoped people were punking the pollsters, but I don’t see R’s having that type of humor.
Simplest answer is that these people are (pick one or more) butt ignorant, blinded by ideology, or dumber than an Adam Sandler movie.
Judging from commentary I see here, even the smart and informed conservatives have at best a casual relationship with reality, and a powerful immunity to facts and data.
JzB
You might choose Mitt if you felt the oncoming election caused Obama to do it.
This seems one more bit of evidence that we humans have a hard time with facts that don’t fit our biases. Certainly, from my own, utterly objective point of view, this intellectual weakness seems more prevalent on the right than anywhere else. The tendency to “know” things that match our biases is pretty universal, though.
Wonkblog has another example, involving perceptions of economic news, and how they diverge as an election approaches:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/ezra-klein/wp/2012/09/11/democrats-republicans-and-independents-are-hearing-very-different-economic-news/
kharris
i agree with you entirely.
trouble is, us unbiased observers would have no way of knowing if our well-informed, intelligent and highly objective views are informed by propaganda both gross and subtle than began with the books we were read as children.
i, of course, have nothing i can do about it but fight for the values i learned before i could read on my own. but actually the values of little children are the values we all ought to be trying to live up to, he said objectively.
[that said, people get mad at me when i say the intelligence of humans is vastly overrated by humans. i think it’s one reason politicians find it works better to just lie to us.]
The problem of proletariat ignorance goes well beyond the lies of individual politicians, though several high level Republicans are making a valiant effort to maintain the phenomenon. There is an entire media structure that is described as journalism, but is never actually just that. The populous is fed a steady diet of misinformation from slight to gross through that same media. There is little insightful questioning that connects what a politician says and the facts of the matter. An interview is too often more like a secondary speaker’s platform intended to entertain as much as to inform. Without requiring that statements and facts do match, what is stated is what is, in the mind of the audience.
In modern American politics – and I’ll cite Gingrich’s early 90’s Contract On America as a watershed moment – lying lies largely in the domain of the right. I don’t believe in the inherent moral superiority of one brand of politico over another – they’re all slimy. It comes down to how much do you need to lie to make your point.
If the truth is on your side, you can be comfortable telling it. But if you want to convince people that, frex, Obama is a foreign-born, terrorist-coddling, Muslim Communist fascist with aspirations to spend your hard-earned tax $$$ in ways previously unheard of, then it becomes necessary to lie a little.
Remember what Lincoln said long ago – you can fool some of the people all of the time. These days, these people are the Rethug base.
JzB
This may illustrate the power of suggestion. If you asked people who deserves credit for killing bin Laden, how many people would think of Romney? How many of the undecided are thinking, “Well, I wouldn’t have thought Romney, but since they ask, I dunno”?
Robo polls may have to be multiple choice, so you can’t ask who, but other comparisons could have been made, as well. E. g., Obama vs. McCain, or Romney vs. Hilary Clinton.
kharris: “The tendency to “know” things that match our biases is pretty universal, though.”
It seems to be associated with authoritarian personality, however. True believers care less about facts than other people.
Min,
and Jack
remember I am on your side. but you fool yourself if you think either “the left” or “the educated” are remotely immune to their own favorite lies.
i think the hard left used to be pretty reliable as to the facts, if not the sollutions, because when you are out of power it is easy to point to the lies of those who are in… there are always plenty to point at.
but oh my dears, self deception is a universal human trait.
one thing that hit me between the eyes when i was studying “psychology” was a casual reference, in an “of course we all know this,” to the “fact” that all humans lie, and being a good liar is a measure of human intelligence.
my poor mother cured me of human intelligence when i was about four. to be perfectly honest with you , i had not known before that lesson that there was anything wrong with making up a story that you liked better than , uh, the other one.
coberly: “remember I am on your side. but you fool yourself if you think either “the left” or “the educated” are remotely immune to their own favorite lies.”
That’s not what I said. π
You may find this interesting. π
http://members.shaw.ca/jeanaltemeyer/drbob/TheAuthoritarians.pdf
ah, min
probably it was not what you said. it only sounded like what you said. that happens to me all the time.
i agree about authoritarian personality types. and usually i manage not to argue with them. but i have had some experience with true and lovely liberals who are pathological liars and/or fools.
i am not thinking of present company.
IMHO, white working class is everyone that is not “other” working class.
Even poor white folks think they are white working class and everyone else is leeching off the government.
@coberly
I sound like myself a lot. π
I know that I sometimes give the wrong impression. That’s one reason that I use smileys a lot. π
Min
according to “psychology” we misunderstand each other a lot more than we realize, and it matters a lot less than we think.
Dan Crawford writes:
Choosing Mitt is beyond me….’not sure’ might involve George Bush, but if memory serves he declared it ‘unimportant’ sometime in 2008.
This is from a March 13, 2002 press conference with the president:
>>>>>[2:22] President Bush: …Well, as I say, we haven’t heard much from him. I wouldn’t necessarily say that he’s at the center of any command structure. Again, I don’t know where he is. I, uh [laugh], I, I repeat what I said, I truly am not that concerned with him. I know he is on the run. I was concerned about him when he had taken over a country.<<<<< John Kerry referred to the comment in the final 2004 presidential debate and President Bush responded, “I don’t think I ever said I’m not worried about Osama bin Laden. That’s kind of one of those exaggerations.”
and yet Bush won the election.
maybe this is connected in some way with why Obama has consolidated the police state and international terrorism (U.S. version: drones) begun (publicly) under the Bush.