I posted this on Michael Prescott's blog under the post titled "So who is going to win this thing?" Prescott has some interesting thoughts on the election.
I too have no idea how the election is going to turn out. I’m not convinced the constant mantra of the polls about an inevitable Obama victory is necessarily true. If McCain does win it will be a testament to his dogged determination to have overcome the mainstream media’s unabashed lack of objectivity, their obvious favoritism for Obama and palpable hatred of Palin. I agree that Obama has done a wonderful job of sounding centrist while in reality he is fairly leftist, if you look at his voting record and his plan for what he would do if elected. I also believe the media harps on the polls to convince potential voters of the near hopelessness of the McCain campaign and the inevitability of an Obama election so that the polls become a self-fulfilling prophecy. While I haven’t studied the methodology of all of the polls I’ve noticed that the fine print on some CNN polls admits that they contacted, say, 40% Democrats and only 30% Republicans, thus building in an almost automatic bias for Obama.
What I think is interesting about all of this is the heavy influence of postmodernism, particularly on the Left and in the media. By that I mean the idea that there is no objective truth and therefore it’s acceptable to not strive for objectivity because it is a hopeless venture. Therefore it is OK to omit inconvenient facts, to heavily favor Obama over McCain in your reporting, and to claim the election is a fiat accompli thanks to the polls.
Plus the Left is wedded to egalitarianism, not in terms of political egalitarianism in which all of us have equal rights but in terms of economic egalitarianism in terms of equal economic outcome regardless of one’s merits and work ethic. I believe this is the fundamental premise behind Obama’s “spreading the wealth” comment when talking to Joe the plumber. There are a lot of problems philosophically and morally with economic egalitarianism which I can’t/won’t get into here.
3 comments:
"While I haven’t studied the methodology of all of the polls I’ve noticed that the fine print on some CNN polls admits that they contacted, say, 40% Democrats and only 30% Republicans, thus building in an almost automatic bias for Obama."
The same bias America at large does...
"The Democratic Party is currently the nation's largest party. In 2004, roughly 72 million (42.6 percent) Americans were registered Democrats, compared to 55 million (32.5 percent) Republicans and 42 million (24.8 percent) independents.["
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Democratic_Party#Ideology_and_voter_base
Thank you for this information. It would seem to justify CNN's approach. Nonetheless there is still ample evidence of news media bias for Obama to the point that Saturday Night Live's Monday night pre-election show even pokes some fun at this partiality. It's also interesting if you accept the statistics published in Wikipedia how close the 2000 Bush-Gore election came. Apparently a large enough portion of that 10% differential in favor of Democrats defected to make the 2000 election as close as it was in which Gore won the popuar vote by a 0.51% margin (with a voter turnout of roughly 50%).
not that its wrong, it probably is right, but the first anonymous poster referenced to wiki... which is, sad to say, not so reliable.
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