Globally Rational

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The Pew Research Center, which always seems to come up with great surveys and statistics, recently asked people if they think that Barack Obama is Muslim.  10% of people said “yes”, which is obviously wrong.  Do people think that Islam is an ethnicity and not a religion?  Or do they think that anybody who lived in Indonesia is a Muslim?  Well, it’s probably not the latter… because most Americans don’t even know that Indonesia is a Muslim country.  So they must be basing their conclusions on faulty assumptions or random rumors… and if you look at the actual data, it’s even more convincing:

• —The opinions are divided across party lines.  16% of conservative Republicans were skeptical of Obama’s beliefs, while only 5% of liberal Democrats felt the same way.
• —16% of evangelical Protestants thought that Obama was Muslim, while only 7% of mainline Protestants agreed.  However, neither group was much more likely than the other (50% vs. 59%, respectively) to believe that he’s Christian.
• —More educated people are less likely to have the misconception.  Among college graduates, 73% think he’s Christian and 5% think he’s Muslim; among people who didn’t go to college, half as many people think he’s Christian (37%) and three times as many believe he’s Muslim (15%).
• —People are very divided based on their region.  19% of rural residents believe that Obama is Muslim, probably because they’re not as well-exposed to different cultures.  In cities and suburbs, the number is less than half as much.  The same sort of trend is evident if you compare the Northeast (7%), the West (6%), the Midwest (13%), and the South (13%).

I’m almost ashamed to live in a non-urban Midwestern area.  It’s obvious that among people who have more experience with world cultures and religions (college graduates, urban residents, people on the East Coast), Obama’s religion is much less of a controversy.  Personally, I don’t even understand how people can make a controversy out of an unquestionable fact… I guess we’ll have to wait until November to see how big of an effect this has on the election.

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Ralph Nader just publicly accused Barack Obama of trying to “talk white” and not making a big deal out of issues such as “payday loans, predatory lending, asbestos, [and] lead”. He went on to say that Obama “wants to show that he is not … another politically threatening African-American”. My favorite is the following statement:

“He wants to appeal to white guilt. You appeal to white guilt not by coming on as black is beautiful, black is powerful. Basically he’s coming on as someone who is not going to threaten the white power structure, whether it’s corporate or whether it’s simply oligarchic. And they love it. Whites just eat it up.”

I can have a field day with this, but I promise not to be too harsh:

—-Since when is it possible to talk in colors? Do I “talk brown” because my skin is brown? Obama was raised by his white mother (and her white parents) after his parents’ divorce… so if he was raised in a white household, why would he not “talk white”?

—-I agree that Obama wants to show that he’s not politically threatening. Since when does a politician want to appear to be a threat? I can’t remember the last time I saw somebody make a serious run for President without making it obvious that he/she was not a threat.

—-Nader seems to think that Obama is “appealing to white guilt” by saying that he is “not going to threaten the white power structure”. I’d go as far as to call this comment “racist”… does Nader seriously believe that Obama is a threat to the white power structure? I didn’t even realize that white people had their own power structure. Is it whites-only? Can I join? How does somebody apply to become a member? And why would Obama want to threaten it?

—-When was the last time that payday loans, predatory lending, asbestos, and lead were major election issues? Nader seems to think that just because Obama is black, he should be focusing on “black” issues. He clearly said the following:
“There’s only one thing different about Barack Obama when it comes to being a Democratic presidential candidate. He’s half African-American. Whether that will make any difference, I don’t know. I haven’t heard him have a strong crackdown on economic exploitation in the ghettos.”
So, apparently, Obama should be thinking about ghetto issues just because he’s black. Ignore the fact that he was born in Honolulu, grew up in Hawaii and Indonesia, and went to school at Harvard. Obama should stay true to his “roots” by focusing on the “ghetto”.

Nader seems to think that Obama should be acting blacker. Apparently, he’s only acting white so that he can get votes (because, as Nader’s track record will show, he doesn’t think that votes are important in a Presidential race). It seems that despite the fact that Obama was raised by a white person in Hawaii and Indonesia, Nader believes that he should act “black” just because of the color of his skin.

I usually try to be more balanced in my articles… but I just can’t tolerate blatant racism from a major Presidential candidate.

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It’s common for a Presidential nominee to replace the chair of his party with one of his own people.  Although Barack Obama’s recent decision to keep Howard Dean as the DNC chair was minor news at best, I think it’s much more important than the media has made it seem.  I think the foreshadowing is undeniable; this will tell us a lot about what a potential Obama presidency would be like.  Here are some things that jump out at me:

• Obama did not install one of his cronies, which would be a huge change over past Presidencies.  In fact, some people at the University of Chicago (whose law and economics programs are among the best in the world) are worried that Obama will steal all of their best professors and put them into his cabinet.
• Howard Dean (a licensed physician) and Barack Obama (a Harvard-educated lawyer who was offered a tenure-track faculty position at one of America’s best law schools) are both highly intelligent and highly educated.  This gives me hope that we’re approaching an America where politicians work together and make intelligent decisions for the benefit of the country instead of trying to benefit their own respective political campaigns.
• A lesser-known fact: Obama and Dean have both strayed substantially from their parents’ life views, which suggests to me that they embrace change and positive development.  Howard Dean grew up in a conservative family and Obama has written (among other similar things) that “my mother’s confidence in needlepoint virtues depended on a faith I didn’t possess… In a land [Indonesia] where fatalism remained a necessary tool for enduring hardship… she was a lonely witness for secular humanism, a soldier for New Deal, Peace Corps, position-paper liberalism.”

I’m hoping that this is a positive sign for Obama’s campaign and, eventually, his Presidency.  It’s no secret to my regular readers that I’m a bit biased (I’ve supported Obama ever since Ron Paul fell into oblivion and McCain started to turn into another Bush), but am I wrong?

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This is the second guest post by Kola. He will be a more regular writer in the future, so we won’t need to use the term “guest post” anymore for him.

What is this magical word that conjures up feelings of resentment in the American people? It didn’t sound connotatively negative until the media bit the syllables on it a few thousand times. When I think about the word elite the first thing that comes to mind is ’skilled.’ The second is ‘top of the class.’ It seems to me an incredibly positive word worthy of any man or woman I would want as my president.

Is it possible that the tag line ‘pretentious’ isn’t catchy enough for the American people? I think it’s all too obvious that’s what the news media was trying to say about Obama after his completely accurate comments regarding the actions of…pretty much rural USA.

Could it be that they had to dumb down the words to tell these people Obama was calling them dumb?

The greater issue that concerns me here is that our intelligence on a whole is being assessed as low for the sake of political enlightenment. The news media won’t deliver us easy details on the candidates’ plans for education, environment, economy, etc, because we haven’t the mental power to stay interested in such details. But when it comes to a candidate lying to glorify themselves a little, calling hicks hicks, or a charismatic preacher speaking his mind in an entertaining fashion, we are fed this as the important political insights. These are the facts we will be electing our representative from!

And if all this is true, and not just a plot by the news corps to keep us dumb, then Obama is truly elite. If not, maybe he is just pretentious.

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Everybody involved with American politics has been hearing a lot recently about Jeremiah Wright, the radical leftist pastor at Barack Obama’s church. What I ask is this… why is it that these sorts of statements are a major issue, but we don’t care about the fact that John McCain (among others) vies for the support of radical right-wing religious leaders like Pat Robertson

I won’t make any comparisons between Robertson and Wright; I’ll let you do that yourself. However, here are some things that Robertson has said over the course of the last few years (to give credit where credit is due, I got a lot of these from Wikipedia):

• He said, “You say you’re supposed to be nice to the Episcopalians and the Presbyterians and the Methodists and this, that, and the other thing. Nonsense. I don’t have to be nice to the spirit of the Antichrist.”
• The acceptance of homosexuality could lead to hurricanes, earthquakes, tornadoes, terrorist bombings and “possibly a meteor.”
• He repeatedly spoke in favor of Charles Taylor, a Liberian war criminal with whom he is said to have had some business dealings.
• Speaking about Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, he said “I don’t know about this doctrine of assassination, but if he thinks we’re trying to assassinate him, I think that we really ought to go ahead and do it. It’s a whole lot cheaper than starting a war, and I don’t think any oil shipments will stop.”
• When Ariel Sharon (former Israeli President) had a stroke, Robertson said that it was God’s way of seeking retribution for the fact that Sharon considered giving some land back to the Palestinians.
• He has repeatedly denounced Islam, including saying that “Islam, at its core, teaches violence” (which is obviously not true… Islam never taught me any violence, for instance). He also called Muslims “Satanic” and made various other radical statements.
• He named 101 liberal American professors and accused them of being “racists, murderers, sexual deviants and supporters of Al-Qaeda.” He also said that they are “communists, they are radicals, they are, you know, some of them killers, and they are propagandists of the first order”. Honestly, I’m not sure how an Al-Qaeda supporter can be a Communist… and he seems to ignore the fact that he himself is a propagandist.
• He predicted a terror attack on US soil in 2007, a tsunami (or a hurricane) in 2006 (there were no hurricanes in the US in 2006), and Doomsday in 1982.
• He accused “pagans, and the abortionists, and the feminists, and the gays and the lesbians” of contributing to the 9/11 attacks (this statement was made 2 days after the attacks).

I’m not saying that Robertson is any better or worse of a person than Wright… but to me, these statements seem just as radical as the ones that have been all over the news recently. Meanwhile, Republican leaders aren’t bothered at all for getting support from these evangelicals; Obama has been hassled a lot for having supporters like Wright and Louis Farrakhan.

Is Wright really any more radical than Robertson?

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For those of you who haven’t been following the US election, Obama recently said the following (click here for the full transcript); some are calling it “Bittergate”:

The truth is, is that, our challenge is to get people persuaded that we can make progress when there’s not evidence of that in their daily lives. You go into some of these small towns in Pennsylvania, and like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone now for 25 years and nothing’s replaced them. And they fell through the Clinton administration, and the Bush administration, and each successive administration has said that somehow these communities are gonna regenerate and they have not. And it’s not surprising then they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.

Suddenly, people started complaining that he thinks Pennsylvanians are “bitter”. I had thought, until now, that we were past the point of the media taking words out of context… all he really said was that people can get bitter if they’ve had job trouble for the last 25 years and the administration has ignore them. He’s trying to address those people and say that he wants to help them, but some of Hillary’s supporters are attacking him over what seems like nothing. It’s sure as hell not as big of a deal as Hillary’s blatant lie about Bosnia, which they dismissed as “misspeaking”. Apparently, it’s OK for Hillary to lie, but it’s not OK for Obama to use one imperfect word (as she showed once before when he used the word “denounce” instead of “reject”, even though “denounce” was actually more logically correct in context).

That aside, I have a more interesting note: why is it that we add “gate” at the end of every political scandal now? Watergate didn’t have anything to do with water (it was related to the Watergate building in DC), so why was Clinton’s sex scandal dubbed “Monicagate”? It seems that the media is running out of ideas… they can’t find any real problems with Obama, so they take a small word out of context and add “gate” to the end so that it sounds more important. Was Bittergate really as bad as Watergate, or even as bad as Monicagate?

Imagine what it’d be like if we made a big deal every time President Bush misspoke and said something like ““Wait a minute. What did you just say? You’re predicting $4-a-gallon gas? … That’s interesting. I hadn’t heard that.” (Feb 28, 2008).

EDIT (5:34 pm CST): Apparently, the reason why Bittergate hasn’t hurt Obama in the polls is because working-class Pennsylvanians don’t really disagree with him.

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