OK, I said this on my "politics blog" thread:
sozobe wrote:This is also sort of what I was getting at in the "polls" thread about "safer." It's not about intelligence per se (and I was uncomfortable with where Cycloptichorn was going, there), but how much patience people have to wade through stuff vs. going the safer route.
First, I agree with a whole lot of what Cycloptichorn has been saying. Especially stuff about how Hillary is so much more known than Obama, and how there is therefore room for Obama to make progress while people probably already know pretty much everything about Hillary that would make a dent in their decision-making.
I'm not saying, "I disagree completely with everything Cycloptichorn wrote," I'm saying "some things made me wince a bit." I'll kind grab some quotes and group them into two basic themes:
Identity poltics:
Cycloptichorn wrote:So it's really difficult for me to think that all these women who are voting for Hillary, or all these blacks who are voting for Obama, aren't doing so by gender/race reflex. And Hillary's base, who will vote by reflex, is huge. If it wasn't for the fact she was a woman, she wouldn't have a shot in hell of winning.
Quote:It's ridiculous to say that - given that we both agree that the platforms of the various candidates are essentially the same - they are not preferring another woman for the fact that she is a woman. What else are the reasons?
Quote:I don't understand why you are so against the idea that identity politics is ruling the day, as usual. The vast numbers of black voters who are coming to vote for Obama, aren't doing so b/c of his position on foreign trade!
There are a lot of reasons to support Hillary besides the fact that she's a woman. Many people look back to the Clinton days happily and would love a reprise. Many people feel like politics is dirty, period, and best to have the person who knows how to play the game. Many people love the idea of payback -- the idea of driving a bunch of Republicans wild by electing President Hillary. Many people find her accomplishments and policies compelling.
And of course there are many combinations and variations thereof.
I, personally, don't find any of these reasons compelling enough for me to want to vote for Hillary over Obama -- but they exist.
The black identity politics one I find a bit more problematic yet. I've said over and over again, when people try to pin Obama's popularity with black people on the fact that he's black, then how come his numbers were so low with black people for so long? He's been doing this well only very recently. People knew he was black from the outset. If it was as simple as black candidate = black vote, the numbers would have started high and stayed high. People knew he was black from the day he announced he was running.
I think it's also dangerous for him to buy into the identity politics thing. Reduce him to the Black Candidate. He's more than that.
Class:
These quotes are the ones I had in mind when I said that I felt you (Cyclo) were swerving close to "poor people are stupid."
Quote:I also, and you may think I'm an elitist for saying this, I prefer a candidate who is backed by the educated. I think that leading voters who have less education is no badge of honor at all, but honestly should be viewed as a problem. Saying otherwise smacks of Republican 'Ivory-tower' comments. I believe that the more educated are generally better at choosing candidates then the less educated. It's hard to imagine what the argument against this could be; have you read the policy positions that are put out? If you aren't educated, if you don't have some basis of higher math, economics, history, or world politics, then there's little chance that you could even understand them. At the same time, this is the group which is most likely to be susceptible to false attacks and smears upon their opponents, many of which are only accurate in the most technical of senses. Come to think of it, that's exactly the strategy that Hillary has chosen to employ, and it's not honorable, though it may work.
Quote:I posit that blue-collar Americans are the least likely of any polled group to be able to cogently discus issues. And the most likely to vote on name Rec. I haven't seen much evidence that she 'appeals' to them, as much as they simply know her name when they see it on the ballot.
Quote:I don't see how this jives with the large numbers who are coming out to vote in the primaries, either. Only a certain percentage of those who come out will be informed on the issues; many who come out, want to participate, but are not informed on issues and vote on style instead of substance. And yes, I posit that blue-collar workers are more likely to do so.
OK, first, I said "swerved close to..." That's pretty equivocal. But I wince a bit at the stuff about "least likely to be able to cogently discuss issues, mostly likely to vote on style instead of substance," etc. What I liked about the hilzoy piece is that it strikes a more realistic note, to me -- that it's not about intelligence per se but about one's willingness to slog through minutia:
Quote:But when candidates tell the kinds of lies that the Clintons have been telling, they place citizens in a position in which the only way to know what is going on is to become political junkies. Being merely informed is not enough: you have to be the sort of person who actually remembers the article from 2004 that Bill Clinton was referring to when he said that Obama had changed his position on the war, and so forth.
It's like the tobacco companies' attempts to confuse people by coming up with research that seemed to show that smoking was harmless. The strategy is to sow enough doubt that people who are not willing to slog through the science, the interminable debates about the methodological deficiencies of this or that study, etc., etc., etc., are likely to come away with a vague sense that the case that smoking is bad isn't all it's cracked up to be. It is designed to leave people with two options: either spend an awful lot of time working through the science, or be misled. In so doing, it asks a lot of ordinary people who have lives to lead: it prevents them from just reading stuff, forming a more or less correct view, and acting accordingly. And it is deeply wrong.
Likewise here: the Clintons' strategy seems to be designed to leave people with two options: either become political junkies, follow every tiny detail of all these stories, and make up your minds on the merits, or not, in which case you will be left with a vague sense that Obama is not all he should be -- a sense that is wholly unsupported by the facts.
It's a fine distinction, but I think it's a distinction worth making. I bolded a different part here than when I cited it in my "politics blog" thread, to emphasize that I don't think these people are
unable to make informed and intelligent decisions; I think that when the picture is deliberately muddied as it has been, it becomes more difficult for them to do so, and not necessarily for reasons of intelligence.
That's really not contradictory to what you've been saying, and it has the same end result (the better-known and "safer" candidate gets more votes, and that's not necessarily a positive reflection on that candidate's campaign skills), but there is a different emphasis.
What we type here basically floats off into the void and doesn't have any real effect. But I think tone matters, and I think dismissing female and blue-collar supporters of Hillary's in the way you have ultimately doesn't help anything. I think it's just that tone, from many quarters, that helped Hillary win New Hampshire. And partly because I agree with you enthusiastically that Obama is not just a better candidate than Hillary but a much better candidate, I think it's important to avoid that when possible.
Thanks for the new one!