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10/31/04 The Case Against Republican Voters Liberals, who have failed to convince the general public that President George W. Bush is a fool, have now taken to claiming that the people who support him are fools. They have a "think tank" on their side, an apparently liberal organization (I'm sure they call themselves "non-partisan") called the Program on International Policy Attitudes (PIPA). They have chosen a few contentious issues in international policy, about most of which our knowledge is quite limited, and posed "gotcha" questions in polls designed to detect ignorance among supporters of President Bush and the war in Iraq. Their methods and conclusions are flawed. We have not found evidence that Saddam Hussein had WMD prior to the beginning of the war in Iraq, and the Duelfer report has concluded, on the basis of the evidence we haven't found, that Iraq's programs had been dismantled and his stockpiles probably destroyed. But the report also concedes that there is significant evidence out there that has not been investigated. In other words, just like the conclusions prior to the war that there were still massive stockpiles of weapons in Iraq because there was no evidence they had been destroyed--conclusions that turned out to seem false--the conclusions now that they were not there are not certain. But because liberals like the most recent conclusions that cannot be regarded as definitive, they have declared them true, and now they are asking people to answer questions about them. They asked people to tell them the conclusions of the Duelfer report, and when 57% of the Bush supporters said they believed the report had concluded that Iraq had WMD or major programs to develop them prior to the war, they imply, by stating that the Bush supporters' opinion is incorrect, that Bush supporters are relatively uninformed, and when Kerry supporters hold the opposite positions, they imply that the Kerry supporters are relatively better informed. The report's analysis of the reasons why Bush supporters gave "wrong" answers to certain questions explicitly suggests that Bush supporters have opinions on various issues and assume that Bush must share them. The report offered no analysis of the more "correct" answers of Kerry's supporters, so the implication is that Kerry's supporters must actually understand Kerry's positions. But that is far from the only possible explanation, and in view of the truth, it is not the most probable. It is arguably in the interests of Bush supporters to believe that there was a sound basis for the war, and in the interests of Kerry supporters to believe there was not. Therefore, if one is going to argue that the Bush supporters take their supposedly incorrect views due to their support for Bush, and not due to their first-hand knowledge of the state of the evidence, it is equally reasonable to attribute the opposing positions of Kerry supporters not to first-hand knowledge, but to their desire to find their candidate to have a sound basis for his positions. Likewise, if Kerry's positions happen to mirror the opinions of his supporters better than those picked out by liberals to test Bush supporters, that doesn't make Kerry's supporters more knowledgeable, just more lucky. The PIPA analysis ignores all these considerations. Clearly, the goal of PIPA and the liberal media types who have been reporting their results with glee is not to assess the general state of knowledge of the contents of boring reports or obscure foreign policy issues, but to draw the conclusion that Bush supporters are more ignorant than Kerry supporters, and in fact that Bush supporters have no particular allegiance to the truth. But the same kind of "gotcha" polling could easily demonstrate the ignorance or bias of Kerry supporters, and by the same reasoning would draw us to the conclusion that they don't care about the truth. For example, I would imagine most Kerry supporters believe John Kerry earned three Purple Hearts. It has been proved that he did not, since even he himself admits through surrogates that one of the three wounds for which he received the award was not suffered in combat (which is the requirement for earning a Purple Heart). If most of Kerry supporters believe he earned three Purple Hearts, the liberal reasoning would indicate that they don't care about the truth, since it is demonstrably untrue. And the fact that most Bush supporters would probably say that Kerry did not earn three Purple Hearts--well, let's just say the liberal hypocrites will not concede that the Bush supporters demonstrate greater knowledge or wisdom when they agree with something that can be factually demonstrated. Similarly, many Kerry supporters believe that Bush began plotting his attack on Iraq immediately after 9/11. The facts, however, have been extensively reported, both in a book by Bob Woodward and in the report of the 9-11 Commission: there were discussions about Iraq at that time, but Bush demanded proof of a connection before he would focus on it. He asked for a plan of attack (as would any competent commander-in-chief), but Iraq was tabled for the moment, and Afghanistan was the only focus of activity at that time. If a majority of Kerry supporters believed that Bush was out to get Iraq all the time, the liberal analysis used in the PIPA study would lead us to the conclusion that Kerry supporters don't care about the truth. And if a majority of Bush supporters disagreed with that statement, that same analysis would tell us the Bush supporters were the only ones who cared about the truth. Many other signature positions of the left that can be refuted by examining facts and reports would yield similar results. How many Kerry supporters believe that Bush's tax cuts disproportionately favored the rich? In fact the highest percentage cuts went to the middle class, and all middle and lower-class taxpayers pay a lower percentage of the overall federal income tax burden than they did prior to the cuts, while the riches pay a higher proportion. How many believe the recession of 2001 started because of Bush's policies? He hadn't enacted any policies when the recession was already well under weigh. How many believe Bush manipulated intelligence to justify going to war in Iraq? All official reports have cleared both Bush and Tony Blair of any such attempt. But these falsehoods continue to circulate in liberal circles. Should we conclude they don't care about the truth? Or that they are ignorant? Perhaps they have been duped by shoddy media coverage. But they certainly aren't in a different category from the Bush supporters singled out by PIPA as living in a fantasy world. No, the PIPA poll and the liberal analysis that uses it to make fools of Bush supporters is flawed. People's opinions are influenced by many factors, and it is fair to conclude that most Republicans and most Democrats don't have a thorough understanding of the nuances of the truth. There are so-called moderate voters who may just go into the voting booth and flip a coin in their minds, casting a vote based on nothing but a momentary whim. That is unfortunate. But the media have played a huge role in creating ignorance and perpetuating it. Republicans know, having watched the mainstream media for decades playing favorites in political coverage, that if reporting is harmful to a Republican, it is very likely to be false or distorted, because in many cases such reporting has been demonstrably so. In 2000, there was the "October Surprise" about Bush's drunk driving arrest decades before--a story the Los Angeles Times sat on until the brink of the election, and then sprang it on the nation, nearly pushing the electorate into electing Al Gore. This year, it was the half-baked story, rife with still-unconfirmed assumptions, that the President was somehow responsible for letting 1/2,000th of the explosives in Iraq to fall into the hands of terrorists. It still isn't clear what the truth is, but CBS was planning to drop that bomb two days prior to the election, to ensure that there was no time to respond effectively before the electorate made its decision. There is the persistent myth that there was widespread voter intimidation in Florida in 2000, or that there was some effort by Republicans to disenfranchise liberal voters, both ideas which have been refuted by official investigations. With media that are trying to win elections for the Democrats, it is hardly surprising if Republicans are forced to go more on faith than on the basis of reporting they know they can't trust. I'm not sure why Democrats remain largely ignorant, since the media generally parrots their views. I suppose that is why: nothing they believe is ever challenged in the popular culture. The Kerry supporters don't know any more about the facts than Bush supporters (at least there's no evidence in this study that they do). They are blindly accepting the word of a man who has many times lied about his own service, and about the service of others, who has repeatedly accused the President of lying, and has never shown once that he actually lied, and who has committed himself to behave as President in a way completely at variance with his behavior throughout the rest of his public career. If that isn't indicative of ignorance, I don't know what is. Modified: 11/06/2004 |
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