Will People Remember Palin?

Will people remember Sarah Palin in 2012?

The GOPVP candidate and Alaska governor is positioned to make a run for president then, or so goes the rumor, but a brief CNN story this morning asked people who was John Kerry's vice presidential running mate in 2004.

Three people they asked, three people whiffed it.



Now I know how TV works -- more may have gotten it right but didn't make it past the editing booth. TV is more about compelling video than actual news. But let's give CNN the benefit of the doubt and look at this incredibly minuscule survey of three people as somehow educational and informative (stay with me, I know it's a stretch, but stay with me). Edwards was the running mate, obviously, and he even hit the news again recently when an affair became public knowledge. So you'd think he would be memorable, what with that perfect hair and screwing around on his wife and all that.

So again I wonder, will people remember Palin?

My answer: Yep, you betcha!

She's no John Edwards. She'll remain a media darling, she still has public office, and although there will be a stretch there where she kinda disappears from the radar she will re-emerge and play a role in the 2012 campaign. But I don't see her as the nominee. Political parties tend to move on, and there are a few good candidates waiting for their chance for the GOP, like the governor from Louisiana.

My interest here, obviously, is on what people know. So that small, insignificant, completely unscientific poll this morning on TV tells me something -- that people quickly forget. Palin will have to fight that, maybe by being Alaska's U.S. senator, maybe by doing something radical in Alaska, maybe by starting a talk show or appearing in a film. But we forget those VP types quickly, even the quirky ones, so to stay in the public mind she'll have to work at it.

Can she do it? You betcha.

Now That It's Over ...

Now that the election is over, what the hell do I write about? All the stuff I wrote about before the election.

This blog is about whether and how people learn from the media, not really about presidential elections, though we often focus on campaigns as a way to understand how people make sense of their political world. I'll return now to looking at studies of political knowledge and, soon, an examination of how people learned about McCain and Obama. I want that data to settle a bit before I start messing around, peeking under the hood.

But what people know is also more than politics. I love looking at how people learn about geography or history or science, what they know versus what they think they know, and of course examples of truly dumb or truly smart folks. And no doubt there will be a cottage industry of new books to soon emerge and if they touch on this subject in any way, I'll cover them as best I can.

Now for a brief presidential moment. It'll be interesting to see how people's perception of Obama changes once he shifts from campaigning to the hard work of governing. Campaigning is about poetry, someone once said, while governing is about prose. The flourishes of the stump speech disappear when it gets down to the nitty gritty of compromise and sacrifice and playing political poker. What people know about Obama, or think they know, will change. That's part of the fun, studying this stuff.

Prediction Time

My prediction, for what it's worth:

Obama wins with 53 percent of the
popular vote and 315 electoral votes.

In the What People Know category, by sometime tonight we'll know because the networks and various political web sites are trying to decide when to "call" the election. CBS may go earlier than other networks, relying heavily (too heavily?) on exit poll and other data. CNN may report when other networks make the call but play it a little more conservatively when it comes to their own projections. No word yet from Comedy Central and their strategy, other than to be really really funny.

Watch for code words from analysts who already know the numbers but aren't sharing them. "John McCain looks to have a really long night" or something like that, or "The Obama campaign can't help but be happy." Code phrases that really say the analyst has seen the numbers and wants to look particularly smart when he or she gets around to sharing them with the unwashed.

It's always been done this way, but average viewers never knew it until fairly recently. Another layer, another curtain, pulled away. The result ain't pretty, but then again neither is making sausage.

Two Schools of Thought

We have two schools of thought about tomorrow and how the election comes out versus what the polls have been telling us:

1. The Bradley Effect kicks in and all those people who said they would vote for Obama find they cannot vote for an African American. The election turns out closer than expected. Questions asked of the polls, the media, and democracy.
2. A effect opposite from #1 above is seen, that the polls underestimated a runaway Obama victory. Questions asked of the polls, the media, and democracy.

Or it could be your basic result similar to the one we see in the polls and electoral vote counts and all the rest. Then we can all move on.

Voting, or Not

I blogged yesterday about John Stossel asking whether there are not some people who simply should not vote. Here's a link to Stossel's ABC bit (thanks to Jon-Michael). See my post below for the link to Stossel's column.

To pick on a rock concert to question young people on their political knowledge, that strikes me as unfair. I notice Stossel didn't go to a nursing home and quiz old people. Why not? Maybe because they're the only ones still watching ABC.

Are some people simply so politically disconnected that we're better off not having them vote?

That raises the counter question -- would you have a test for who can vote, who cannot? The typical response is to spit and sputter and explain how that's not what he or she is proposing, not a test. Not a Jim Crow test. But it comes down to that, doesn't it? Hell, even Jon Stewart posed this one to Rick Shenkman, who wrote Just How Stupid Are We? The book details the political ignorance of the American electorate. I blogged about it some time ago. In that blog you'll find a video link to Shenkman's funny The Daily Show appearance. Watch it. Shenkman doesn't agree with a test either. But it is the natural consequence of asking this kind of question.

People who can't answer how many U.S. senators there are -- and we agree everyone should know this -- can still vote their economic self interest, or at least their perceived economic self interest. There is no constitutional requirement for basing your vote on specific criteria such as those approved by political scientists and journalism professors who blog too much. Sure, this leads to ideological inconsistencies and unexplainable voting patterns, but let's face it -- that's good fodder for political scientists who study this stuff, yet more academic articles to be read by tens of people worldwide.

In a perfect world we would have a deliberative democracy, and in a perfect world Georgia would not have lost to Florida. But the world ain't perfect, and neither is democracy. It's messy, and people who vote who don't know a hell of a lot, and they vote for what some may think are the wrong reasons. I suspect this has a lot to do with Stossel's problem. He'd be less concerned about the youth vote if it was going one way and not the other.

Clueless Stossel

John Stossel, the TV guy, has a column in my local daily today. The local headline, and the gist of the column, is: 'Clueless' folks shouldn't vote Tuesday.

Stossel appears on 20/20, a show I could never take seriously.

He or one of his minions wandered around rock concerts asking young people random political knowledge questions. How many U.S. senators are there? Who's this lady in the photograph (Ruth Bader Ginsberg or Sarah Palin). Does John Stossel look better on TV or in person? From this, the estimable Stossel generalizes to the youth population as a whole, or tries to.

Too bad he relies on this questionable sampling and doesn't look at the (I agree) odd real surveys that show young people are more knowledgeable about the campaign than older voters. He writes:

Is it elitist to say only some people should do brain surgery? If you don't know what you're doing, you are not doing the country a favor by voting."

An old, tired argument. Then again, is it elitist that journalists know what the hell they're doing before getting into a topic they don't grasp?

I sympathize a little. Democratic theory rests on the idea of an informed electorate, but as I've blogged about for a million years now there is a lot of debate on what qualifies as "informed." Some doofy TV guy, no doubt innocent of this debate, is not a source of information or judgment.

Clueless? Methinks a mirror would help him find a lack of cluedom.

Pickin' on Palin

I hate to pick on Sarah Palin. She's been victim enough, but a Newsweek poll asks respondents if Palin is "well informed about major domestic and foreign policy issues, or not"?

Thirty-five percent say she's well informed. Fifty-seven percent say -- not. Eight percent don't know, are unsure, or couldn't care less. No breakdown by presidential preference or party identification, which is too bad.

Again, not gonna pick on Palin. She's brought a lot of energy to the McCain campaign, and some damn good SNL skits. But it's always interesting when people judge the knowledge of others. The ANES surveys include a question I truly love, one in which the interviewer estimates at the end of the survey the intelligence of the interviewee. It's a damned good predictor of lots of other factors, from education to how well those respondents answered other knowledge questions.

In other words, people can sometimes be pretty good estimators of this kind of thing, even people they barely know.

So am I Pickin' on Palin? Maybe. Then again, who hasn't?