So said Winston Churchill. And after watching the short documentary How Obama Got Elected, it's hard to disagree.
An interesting use of video cameras and the internet to... excuse the phrase... speak truth to power. Because it wasn't so much a case of shining a spotlight on a bunch of dopes as it was shining a spotlight on the media. On Election Day, Twelve Obama supporters were asked a series of questions from who people like Barney Frank (which explains why the general public isn't demanding he be drawn and quartered the way they were Ken Lay) and Harry Reid were, to who's controlling Congress, to who has a pregnant teenage daughter.
The video is truly hair-raising, and infuriating. These dipsticks were grossly ill informed yet, I'm have little doubt that if you got into a debate with one of them, especially Adarsha, whose conditioned response to the mere mentioning of the name Sarah Palin would have made Pavlov drool, would not doubt think, and I'm sure tell you, that you were the one who didn't know what they were talking about. Oh, and probably racist too.
The one bright spot was Erika who showed genuine surprise and concern over things like Biden's plagiarism and Obama's having all of his opponents tossed off the ballot for his first election win. It was still troubling, however, that knowing that she's not as informed as she thought, she was still okay with voting for Obama.
But since you can't really call the interviewing of a dozen or so Obama voters scientific, they hired the pollsters at Zogby to conduct a phone poll. The results:
512 Obama Voters 11/13/08-11/15/08 MOE +/- 4.4 points
97.1% High School Graduate or higher, 55% College Graduates
Results to 12 simple Multiple Choice Questions
57.4% could NOT correctly say which party controls congress (50/50 shot just by guessing)
71.8% could NOT correctly say Joe Biden quit a previous campaign because of plagiarism (25% chance by guessing)
82.6% could NOT correctly say that Barack Obama won his first election by getting opponents kicked off the ballot (25% chance by guessing)
88.4% could NOT correctly say that Obama said his policies would likely bankrupt the coal industry and make energy rates skyrocket (25% chance by guessing)
56.1% could NOT correctly say Obama started his political career at the home of two former members of the Weather Underground (25% chance by guessing).
And yet.....
Only 13.7% failed to identify Sarah Palin as the person on which their party spent $150,000 in clothes
Only 6.2% failed to identify Palin as the one with a pregnant teenage daughter
And 86.9 % thought that Palin said that she could see Russia from her "house," even though that was Tina Fey who said that!!
Only 2.4% got at least 11 correct.
Only .5% got all of them correct. (And we "gave" one answer that was technically not Palin, but actually Tina Fey)
The point being that the media and their endless fawning over and protection of The One, as well as their ceaseless hammering of his His opponents, namely Gov. Palin, had a major role in this year's election. A big "No kidding", but still, an interesting, and troubling, survey to say the least.
