The beauty (or danger) of Facebook is that your opinions tend to come out to everybody who can see your profile, even those you don't hardly know. For example, I knew a kid back in high school named Callum, who recently posted a link on his page that took me to this segment of the Howard Stern Show that suggests that many black voters support Barack Obama simply because he's black. From this I can make the inference that Callum supports John McCain, even though I've talked to Callum maybe once in the past six years.
In my mind, it warrants contemplation that nowadays you can find out somebody's opinions and persuasions without really talking to them, where before you would probably have to have some sort of extended interaction or correspondence with the person to figure that stuff out. I don't know if this is a good or bad thing, but it's just food for thought.
But back to the clip from Stern. I'd suggest listening to it because I can't accurately describe how very ironic it really is, but basically one of Stern's correspondents goes into Harlem and asks people (presumably black) who they support, and invariably they all support Obama. The correspondent asks if they support him because of his position on a given issue, but they ascribe John McCain's stance on the issue to Obama. For example, they ask people if they support Obama's pro-life stance (when he's actually pro-abortion) and they all say they agree wholeheartedly. Shockingly, when asked if they thought Obama made a good choice selecting Sarah Palin as his VP (which McCain actually did, obviously), they said they thought it was just fine and she'd be a great VP.
The inference Stern wants to illustrate, of course, is that many black people support Obama simply because he's black, not because of his stance on the issues. I think the clip is hilarious and a particularly biting indictment of the role race is apparently playing playing in the election. Although I would propose a counter-example. Let's say we take a trip down to the deep South, say Alabama, Mississippi, or wherever. Go to some typical white-bread town that could be described as Harlem, only for white people instead of Afro-Americans. Swap the experiment so as to attribute Obama's policies to McCain and ask the white folk if they support McCain on those issues. I'd bet dollars to door nails that the results would be fairly similar to Stern's social experiment.
My point is, despite the fact that most Americans say they would vote for a candidate without considering race, I think it's fair to say that in communities where race is closely identified with the community identity (like Harlem), voters are nevertheless likely to vote along racial lines rather than ideological, and that applies not only to minority groups, but to whites as well. I don't know if Stern brought that up or not, but I think it warrants mentioning to prevent any idea that it's just blacks who do this. If you live or grew up in a community whose identity is based heavily on race, I think it's entirely possible that you'll vote for a candidate based on his race without even bothering to find out about his politics, no matter if you're black, white, brown or purple.
And quite frankly, that's a very unfortunate conclusion.
Voter education would go a long way in eliminating this phenomenon, in my opinion. People should step past broad generalizations about a candidate based on appearance or party support and vote based on issues and, to a lesser extent, character. I invite all who read this to really examine their candidates principles and ideas if you haven't done so already, and see if you still come out on their side.
Monday, October 13, 2008
Voting for Race--Just an Issue for Obama?
Friday, October 10, 2008
Those Nutty Leftists
If you've read the stuff in the news today about allegations of voter registration fraud, you probably already realize that this post title is a pun. For those of you who don't know, allow me to explain.
The Association of Communities for Reform Now, or ACORN, as it's more commonly known, is under investigation in Missouri, Connecticut, and Ohio for alleged voter registration fraud.
Go ahead, Google "Acorn voter fraud." I'll wait...
*Toe-tapping*
*Stretching*
*Looking at my watch*
Ok, are we good? Great.
Did you catch the one in the NY Post about the guy in Cleveland who was paid in cigarettes and petty change to register 72 times? Really? How does this happen, especially so close to an election? The guy's name is Freddie Johnson, a 19-year-old kiosk worker in a mall. According to him, he told ACORN activists that he was already registered to vote, to which they simply replied, "Oh, well, can you sign up again?" The article also mentions ACORN is under investigation in Connecticut for registering a 7-year-old to vote, according to the State Elections Enforcement Commission.
CNN (they of the left-leaning reporting ilk) reports that ACORN, while officially non-partisan, puts particular emphasis on registering low-income voters who tend to vote Democrat. The same report says that in one county alone (I don't know where) out of 5,000 ACORN voter registrations, a little less than half appeared to have been falsified. Bad addresses, names of deceased persons, registrations and signatures written in the same handwriting.
This, of course, comes on the heels of reports that the Obama campaign recently swept through Missouri towns (I think it was Missouri although I could be mistaken) scooping up scores of homeless people and taking them to registration stations to register to vote. While that may not be illegal, it's definitely shady to me, something I hope Obama personally wouldn't stand for. Vote-mongering is pathetic and especially damaging to a candidate who maintains he's not like other politicians.
I had a very interesting conversation with a staunch Obama supporter the other day. I told him this vote-mongering, coupled with the Obama truth squad I mentioned in earlier posts, and cries I've heard from Obama supporters for communist principles has made me very skeptical where I once was clearly in the Obama camp. I realized, though, in speaking to him, that my problem is not with Obama himself, but with his supporters. I still want to believe that Barack Obama is a principled, measured man who will work in a compromising, bipartisan position to unify the country across party lines and dissolve the acrimony that prevents our country from making progress. He's a unifier, a great speaker, and I think that's a desirable quality for a president, especially now when the country is so fracture along political fissures.
But I don't know if I can, in good conscience, vote for a man who is supposed to uphold American ideals when his campaign and his party sympathizers are engaging in behavior like this, trampling the 1st Amendment in Missouri with "truth squads" and abusing one of the most fundamental rights of American citizenry (the right to vote), engaging in a Machiavellian abrogation of Constitutional rights and principles in the name of getting their candidate into office. It's an affront to American dignity that reeks of hypocrisy when a group is willing to ignore and abuse the rights and privileges of its fellow-citizens to get a candidate into an office that is ultimately charged with protecting those same guarantees. The fact that they often display such religious zeal in doing so only adds to my concern.
The question I would ask is essentially this: is it worth it to disregard constitutional freedoms in the name of getting your candidate into office? If so, how is that in any way justifiable? And if not, even if Obama himself didn't approve or participate in these tactics, how can you substantively separate Barack Obama from the actions of his campaign or those who support his party?
The reason I don't post any articles I've mentioned in this post is that I understand that my last few posts may be seen as, if not merely skeptical, outright anti-Obama and Republican. I take great pride in maintaining my distance from either party's ideology, so I'm merely going to repeat what I've heard and read, ask you, dear reader, to look it up yourself, and tell me if you can find anything to the contrary or anything that might ease my concerns.
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