Politicians want to reach independents? OK:
This and this are a waste of time. You won’t attract my vote with image ads or arguing about inadvertent statements.
This is a bit better. Puncture the image. It also led me to factcheck.org, which I will be visiting frequently.
Analyzing policy statements and proposals would be better. Though I must admit the economic policy statements are pretty discouraging thus far.
. . . the things that you do believe? I’m not talking here about religious faith, though this could impact some aspects of faith. I’m talking about just about any topic on which you choose to believe one source over another.
I’ve seen a number of cases recently on blogs, in the mainstream media, in church, and in my daily life in which people have expressed very decided opinions that one person is right and another is wrong. In some cases, I believe the people knew where they had gotten their information and had made some judgment as to whether it was right or not. That doesn’t necessarily mean they agree with me. It does mean that their viewpoint was thoughtful. Others simply repeated what they had heard from a source they felt was credible.
But why do we feel certain sources are credible while others are not? Unfortunately, this is frequently not something we think about seriously. We just find ourselves believing what is written in periodicals we like, on blogs we like, or in books written by authors we like, and we haven’t really considered the reasons. I am not certain how one could survey this. The survey questions would be self-defeating. But I suspect that for many of us the choice is made based on whether the source agrees with our own opinions most of the time. That is likely the main, unconscious reason. (If you’re someone who carefully checks sources, this doesn’t apply to you!)
I believe we also tend to believe people who share our religious or political beliefs. We check our opponents out much more carefully than our friends. Finally, we tend to develop feelings based on who we associate with on a regular basis. I have observed this in many political campaigns. People who associated regularly with people who supported a particular candidate or party tended to believe their candidate or party would win despite all other evidence. They would remember polls that favored their candidates and forget those opposed.
Election season is a good time to ask yourself just how reliable your sources are. I’m not trying to tell you what or who to believe. I’m just suggesting that you make that choice conscious. Find the most objective data possible and evaluate who you listen to. Learn a bit more about learning.
It’s a good goal for election season.
I’m following Joe Carter’s new series on his particular conservative beliefs with interest. I think it’s a valuable thing to do, and blogging about it should provide some interesting reading and discussion.
My interest is in the concept of God-given rights, or rights with which we are endowed by the creator, and the value of that concept (Point 4 in Joe’s second post). Of course, any American reader should know that I’m paraphrasing there from the Declaration of Independence, and that I’m likely to get into trouble asking questions about it. This sort of thing is like machine-gunning sacred cows. But I do question the value of the claim that rights are given by God in political discourse.
I think there’s something wrong with us when one candidate’s show of emotion can get this much press time. I’m hoping that the public are much less excited about this than the press, but political commentators seem to be trying to make it a pivotal point in her campaign, part of that every shifting momentum that they loudly proclaim has changed with every new piece of un-news.
Hillary Clinton is not my favorite candidate for president, but she is not a bad candidate, and how much emotion she shows would likely not be a major issue if she were not a woman. I find this frenzy about a few moments of emotion, one way or another disgusting. I think it’s a major display of sexism, all the more dangerous because nobody wants to acknowledge it.
Let’s do a little bit more analysis of her policies, comparing programs, experience, and vision. The media needs to spend more time on substantive issues. They need to spend less time talking about themselves. So much of the coverage has to do with “what I (the journalist) did when I was with candidate x.” Little information is passed on.
Agree or disagree with Hillary Clinton, she has given us enough specifics in her record and in campaign position papers to occupy a good deal of discussion time. She may not be your favorite candidate or mine, but she deserves to be judged on that record, not on whether she displays precisely the right amount of emotion. I’ve found that one cannot display the right amount of emotion for everyone. I suspect that will be the case here. (My wife comments on this in her book on grief. People will actually criticize others for how they express grief at the loss of a loved one or in some other hardship situation. That is such arrogance!)
I’m going to contribute to this by writing blog posts on candidate’s positions, starting with health care proposals. I’m working on the research for that now.
You’ll notice that I don’t make predictions about who is going to win elections around here. That’s not because I’m really modest and don’t want to let you know how right I am; it’s because I generally don’t have a clue. I do remembering saying to my wife during the 2000 election that I didn’t think they had Florida projected correctly after I looked at a precinct map, but that was because of the obvious (and constant) problem that people project Florida before the panhandle votes get counted, and the panhandle votes heavily Republican.
So after Iowa and New Hampshire, who is listening to the pundits any more? Those guys don’t know any more than I do, and I can testify to you that on the matter of who’s going to win, that means they know, um, some tiny amount indistinguishable from nothing.
No, this is not a post with high intellectual content. It’s just that their words annoyed me leading up to both events, I think they have been proven sufficiently wrong, and I think their faces should be rubbed in it, just so they won’t proclaim what they don’t know with such confidence.
It reminds me of the lousy sports reporters who sense a shift in momentum every team a different team scores. In football I’ve heard reporters speak about shifts of momentum after a team made a first down. “No,” I want to yell at them, “they just made a first down.”
On February 5, we have New York and New Jersey, amongst many others. I can’t imagine Hillary Clinton is going to give up before that, and I suspect Rudy isn’t going to either. I might like them to, but wishes aren’t predictions.
I haven’t seen any results from New Hampshire yet, so this is probably a good thing to write about politics. I’m going to try really, really hard to keep this short. I am very much encouraged by the increased voter turnout thus far, both in Iowa and New Hampshire. I hope it is a trend that continues. More involvement and less apathy will be good for all of us.
What do I want to see in a health care plan? I’d like to see health care:
Of course, anyone with any knowledge of politics and economics can tell me I’m not going to get all three of those, as there are contradictions in them. So what do I think I can get?
It’s something like the little Marilyn Monroe song (later by Madonna as well, I believe) in which we find the lines:
a yacht
that’s not
a lot
The yacht is a lot, but we’d like to think otherwise. It’s the function of a candidate to convince us we can have the yacht without paying for it; once elected, he’ll make us pay for it, but never provide the yacht. This occurred to me as I was reading the few health care plans that the candidates have put forward. For what it’s worth, I congratulate those campaigns that have gotten specific on this issue.
First, I think it’s time for us to have some kind of universal coverage, or at least to head that way in this country. At the moment we have too many people using emergency rooms for primary care, and guess who pays for that. You and I do, sometimes in taxes, sometimes in our medical bills. Further, emergency room care is excessively expensive. But I’m not here to get into the details of emergency room care.
What emergency rooms tell me is something simple. When we are confronted with someone in dire need of medical care, we are not willing to just let that person die. That’s why emergency rooms have to take people in who can’t pay and provide them with a minimum of care. Unfortunately, the same moral compass that leads us to expect care for these people doesn’t seem to lead us to pay for it.
Second, however, and conflicting with the first, medical care is an economic good. It’s not in unlimited supply, it doesn’t just happen. Somebody has to produce it. When we declare that someone has a right to medical care, we’re also by nature implying a duty by someone else to produce that care. When the issue is someone dying of fatal injuries, however, we want to ignore the issue of precisely how the thing to which that person has a right is produced.
This leads me to suggest that we build a system that is as private as possible and use a minimum of government intervention. There are certainly some ways to reduce costs. These include moving more primary care to providers such as nurse practitioners. I don’t have statistics on it (I’m going to do more research) but I believe it will also be valuable to put some kind of restraints on malpractice lawsuits to alleviate fear of using people with less than a medical degree plus a specialty to actually see patients. Personally I think we will be better off, on average with the nurse practitioners providing primary care.
Those items, however, are going to be minor. One thing I noticed in the health care plans I read was a great deal of optimism about saving money. It is very rare that government regulations can be set up to enter an industry and reduce overall costs. Again, it’s a topic for more research, but I am extremely suspicious of the savings numbers given by any of the candidates. It seems to me that the promise of large monetary savings and no new bureaucracy is a bit like “the yacht is not a lot” but yet the time will come when folks have to pay.
Further, there is a good reason why savings don’t ever seem to accomplish what is promised for them. Even wasted money goes into the economy somewhere. If it is used more productively there will be an improvement, but fired government workers, for example, were buying groceries whether their work was productive or not. Overpaid executives put their money in banks where it can be used for investment. In general, when we state either losses from fraud and waste, or savings from eliminating it, we get the idea that more will be accomplished than will actually happen.
So where do I end up? With a compromise. I’d be pretty happy with a private system that nonetheless mandated some level of health care coverage with a safety net program for those who are unable to pay for it. I know that safety net programs tend to become entitlements, but I do not want to see anyone left without basic (that needs to be defined, but not today) coverage, or anyone forced to provide free service. I think this one needs to be taken care of nationally.
PS: To find out why I’m almost certain to be disappointed, read Bureaucracy, by Ludwig von Mises. If you’ve read (or tried to read) Human Action, don’t worry. Bureaucracy is an easy read.
During the 1992 presidential campaign that gave us Bill Clinton, I remarked to a friend that if they would just swap out the candidates for their wives, they would have my vote. In particular I thought Hillary Clinton was substantially smarter than her husband.
Since then I have lived in the south and watched eight years of pretty raw hatred of Bill Clinton, but ever greater hatred of Hillary. Now it happens I’m not a Hillary supporter, though I will almost certainly vote Democrat in this election regardless of their nominee. Yet Barack Obama attracts me a good deal more. At the same time, I would only suffer a minor moment of annoyance should the tide turn yet again and Hillary Clinton became the nominee. (One key issue on which I prefer Obama is simply that he voted against the war in Iraq from the start. He neither claims deception (Clinton), nor a change of mind (Edwards), though Edwards is to be congratulated for the almost unheard of step of announcing he was wrong.)
When I listen to liberals (other liberals?) rage on about Bush in many of the same terms, I just tell myself that this is what people are like. Of course it’s also quite possible that other people have higher expectations of politicians than I do. I never vote for someone I like completely. I always feel that I’m choosing the lesser of two evils. Thus I’m also less disappointed when the person who is actually elected fails to live up to the campaign rhetoric.
But I have never figured out just what makes people hate Hillary Clinton so much. She isn’t the most liberal Democrat, for example. If she were, that would explain many of my conservative friends who despise her. I had come to the tentative conclusion that the combination of opposition to her policies and various levels of dislike of a strong woman in leadership have led to this intense hatred. Of course for some people it’s more obvious!
I followed this link from a trackback to another post to find this feminist blog which actually looks at some data. There has been a tendency to think that women are voting more for Clinton than men, in other words, women are voting their gender. We hear less about men voting their gender. (I wonder why.) But according to the blog post, it seems quite possible that men are voting their gender more than women. I don’t know as this is terribly profound, but it’s worth thinking about.
Making issues like this conscious and explicit rather than subconscious is an excellent way to make our thinking more rational and reality based. Maybe a few folks ought to check their views against Hillary’s and see whether she’s not closer than you think.
Having done that, I must say that one issue–the war–will leave me closer to Obama. Oh well! It was an interesting exercise!
News stories this morning pointed out that Romney outspent Huckabee 6 to 1 in Iowa, yet in the end it wasn’t enough for a win. It’s interesting that the expectation is that spending is equal to votes. It’s unfortunate that it’s often quite true.
Voters frequently complain about the behavior of candidates–too many sound bites, too many negative ads, too much fluff, too few hard proposals. It’s good for voters to be concerned. But the bottom line is that the candidates are going to do what works, that is what gets them elected. If negative ads didn’t work, candidates wouldn’t be using them so much. Now there certainly are times when there is a backlash because of excessively negative ads, or too many of them. But to a large extent, the mud sticks.
There is also a perfectly good place for the negative in a campaign. If a candidate has lied or broken promises before, it should be known. A negative ad can point this out. But there is also a great deal of room for spin, and 30-60 second ads don’t leave much room for nuances. Take the issue of Governor Huckabee and the number of prisoners whose sentences he commuted while governor. How a governor uses the power to pardon people or commute sentences is surely a valid subject for discussion when that candidate seeks re-election or runs for another office. I see no problem with an opponent pointing out such behavior in an ad.
But then there is the issue of context. Numbers don’t always mean what they appear to mean on the surface. Were there more opportunities for pardons or commutations? What reasoning was used? Can you point to specific cases of particular bad judgment? All of those are valid questions. Unfortunately, cynical voters tend to just focus on whether the ad was negative or positive.
Since I am not a Republican (I’m registered independent), I only took a brief look at this issue, but based on that I suspect this issue would end up fairly neutral for me. In other words, I’d disagree with some of what he did, but I wouldn’t regard it as abuse. Were I a Republican voter in an upcoming primary, however, I’d be digging much deeper in order to either confirm that early impression or not. Should he be the Republican nominee, you can be sure I will know.
I am angered by vague positive ads. Everybody’s in favor of “change.” Yet I’m reminded of this scene in C. S. Lewis’s Voyage of the Dawn Treader:
“But that would be putting the clock back,” gasped the Governor. “Have you no idea of progress, of development?”
“I have seen them both in an egg,” said Caspian. We call it Going bad in Narnia. This trade must stop.”
Match the “time for a change” ads with the “make our country great again” ads, which generally don’t give one any hint of just what greatness consists of and how it is that we will attain that greatness. But you play these ads enough times with patriotic music and a flag waving in the background, and people who have no idea what the candidate stands for remember his name in favorable terms. Our problem is that we are not reading, listening, and viewing critically.
The fact is, however, that we as voters really have no excuse not to get the information we need. I have been searching for information on the candidates’ positions on health care, in preparation for my next post in my series “What I want for election day . . .” Now for some candidates there is very little information there, but that in itself is significant information. The Association of Health Care Journalists reported that of the 14 candidates who were in the race when I first read the page, nine had released a health care proposal and only three had responded to a series of questions from the association. (Two candidates have dropped out of the race since I extracted that information.)
Obviously candidates have no obligation to respond to a questionnaire from any particular organization, but it does give an indication of the interest level. The site also provides one with an easy way to access information from the candidates themselves through their web sites. Now I haven’t finished my own research, and I’m not vouching for the accuracy of their list–I’m just using it for illustration.
My question is how many voters will actually read these health care proposals and ask how they would work? I congratulate candidates on putting out proposals that one can evaluate. But if the voters just respond to ads that announce things like “I’m in favor of health care for all” or “I believe we must preserve complete choice in American health care,” they won’t really know what is likely to happen should their candidate have his or her way. Not every proposal will accomplish what it claims it will.
There is simply no reason why money should be so influential. We have the means to spread information on every candidate for very little money, and if the voters took the time to seek out the information, instead of waiting for 30 second spots which by nature cannot truly inform, then the money would have much less influence.
I don’t think that candidate spending, (big money, or whatever you wish to call it), lobbyists, or the mainstream media can be blamed for a misinformed electorate. I think the only reason for the electorate as a whole to be misinformed is that not enough voters wish to be adequately and accurately informed. The information is available if you seek it out. If you’re going to vote, I can think of no adequate excuse for you to enter that voter booth uninformed.
Joe Carter has had a salubrious encounter with the human mind, such as it is, and has discovered that conservatives are sheeple too. “I have to confess that I’d always associated sheeplishness with the Left,” he starts out, but then notes how, in his new role with the Huckabee campaign, he has found sheeplishness amongst conservatives as well. He thinks he should have known this all along.
Well, give yourself a break, Joe. It’s easy to assume that people who agree with one’s well thought out opinions are obviously brilliant and agree only because, having thoroughly examined all the evidence, they are impressed with the brilliance of those opinions. Then one encounters the so-called “popular mind” in action, and one finds out that this isn’t precisely so. And I’m not trying to be particularly sarcastic here about Joe. It really is easy to do, and quite natural. (Oh, and I had considered writing something about Huckabee’s foreign policy, as I thought it was getting badly treated, but since I’m not a Republican I never got up the energy to do the necessary research.)
The addiction to secondary and tertiary sources is becoming (if it hasn’t already become) endemic in our culture. For many of us the facts come from purveyors of opinion without regard to references, sources, context, and logic. It’s not a particular failing of the left or the right, no matter how much each side would like to think it is. Much of public discourse occurs without fact checking. We believe what is said by folks we regard as authorities and we choose authorities based on how sympathetic they are to our own viewpoint. Often we avoid reading those who may disagree, and thus reinforce our feeling of rightness. How could those other folks disagree, given the overwhelming array of authorities (the six people whose blogs I read and who agree with me) who support our position.
Now since I call myself a moderate, I need to add here that moderates are by no means immune to the problem. There’s a particular form of the problem that afflicts moderates in which we look for the extreme positions on an issue, not so that we can study the evidence for them and determine our position without excluding any option, but for the purpose of avoiding the extremes. Moderate sheeple make sure that they can in no way be regarded as extreme. That doesn’t mean that they are resistant to following leaders. Rather, they look for leaders who stay well away from the edges on any issue, and follow them.
It’s very difficult to avoid this problem. I know I have caught myself following someone’s lead on a point without checking a few times, and it’s embarrassing. The answer, of course, is to check your facts, then check your logic, then check them both again. The only way to avoid simply following one’s impressions and feelings is to explicitly look at the foundations of one’s positions. But this is hard work, and modern journalism and popular writing is not helping us carry out the task.
The tendency now is to cite a number of viewpoints. Balance in journalism means that one gives the various views on the topic. In politics, you get a Republican and a Democrat to tell you what they think, and you have balance. You get a Christian and an atheist to express their views on religion, and you have balance. Evaluation of the issues involved don’t matter.
I’m sure we’ve all seen documentaries such as those that come out just about every Easter on the historical Jesus. Several scholars are interviewed, and as the material is narrated, we get short clips of what those individuals may say. But we never get their actual evaluation of the evidence in enough detail to judge for ourselves what they are saying. I rarely watch one of those shows all the way through, because I become agitated. In general I will have read at least something by every scholar they cite, and as they take abbreviated quotes from those authors and charge forward I become more and more agitated until I must choose between changing the channel and damaging the TV when I throw something at the narrator’s head.
We have people getting the impression that they know something about the search for the historical Jesus when most couldn’t identify a pericope, or define what is meant by form, source, or redaction criticism, or identify one or two criteria which any group of scholars might use to determine historicity.
Of course, they believe the documentary is balanced, because they have shown a variety of viewpoints. We’ve gotten to the place where people don’t think it’s nice to evaluate ideas. But some ideas are really stupid. Some ideas are really dangerous. Are we to expect journalists to simply present all sides without giving any kind of evaluation? That seems to be the way that we’re going, and I hear these complaints from people all across the spectrum of political and religious beliefs.
I would suggest that we don’t want neutral media. We want diverse media. These days we have no reason to believe we won’t get diverse viewpoints because there are many sources available. Of course, those sheeple who are looking for a leader to follow will get their information from the easiest source, but in the modern world it’s very difficult to actually exclude an idea from discourse. Just consider the intelligent design movement. Never has a “suppressed” idea been so loudly and constantly proclaimed.
Many today seem to think that “all men are created equal” somehow means that “everything is equal.” We want equal results, equal time, and so forth. But not everybody deserves the same amount of attention. Not every idea deserves the same amount of exposure and proclamation. A few more facts, a few more references, and a little more evaluation would go a long way.
A British teacher was sentenced to 15 days in prison and deportation (which should be a blessing!) for insulting Mohammed. You can read the story here.
Yet this outrage is not sufficient to satisfy some Muslim hardliners. There were protests in Khartoum calling for her execution. The teacher, Gillian Gibbons, has said she doesn’t want this to raise resentment against Muslims, and she is to be commended for her tolerant attitude. I, on the other hand, suggest that this is another danger of the extreme danger of religious fundamentalism, most commonly and forcefully demonstrated in the Muslim world at the moment.
Nobody requires this kind of protection from insult. Those proclaimed as prophets should receive more, rather than less scrutiny. Truth benefits from being questioned and defended. Hyper-sensitivity is a sign of fear–fear of being totally wrong.
This should not be placed on all of Islam, but it should warn us of the extent to which extremes can take us. Religious fundamentalism is but one major manifestation.
