McCAIN HAS BEEN RUNNING ON CHANGE FOR 30 YRS.. HE HAS GONE ACROSS PARTY LINES TO GET THINGS DONE (IE;CHANGE!) HE HAS WAITED A LONG TIME TO HAVE THIS CHANCE TO MAKE REAL CHANGE IN WASHINGTON! IF ELECTED HE WILL HAVE A CABINET OF DEMOCRATS AND INDEPENDANTS AND REPUBLICANS THAT HE HAS WORKED WITH OVER THE LAST 30 YRS! HE KNOWS THOSE IN WASHINGTON THAT WANT CHANGE BUT WERE TO AFRAID TO SPEAK UP FOR FEAR OF THIER PARTIES REPRISAL.. SO THOSE FOLKS WILL BE APPOINTED TO HIS CABINET ! NOW A QUESTION FOR YOU WHO WILL OBAMA PUT IN HIS CABINET ? WHO HAS HE WORKED WITH IN HIS SHORT TIME AS A U.S. SENATOR? AND WHO DOES HE KNOW IN WASHINGTON THAT WANTS REAL CHANGE ( NOT THE LIBERAL VERSION OF IT ) WHO ? IF YOU WANT A NSWER TO THIS YOU HAVE TWO OPTIONS (1) GO TO MOVE ON .ORG AND SEE WHO IS PAYING HS WAY INTO THE WHITE HOUSE ! OR (2) LOOK AT THE COMPANY HE HAS KEPT FOR THE LAST 20YRS ! THAT???S WHO HE WILL APPOINT TO HIS CABINET MAYBE NOT THOSE FOLKS .. BUT ONES EXACTLY LIKE THEM !
In Search of Rational Voters
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None of this is to say that anyone who voted for George Bush in 2004 was a fool. But anyone who voted for him on the grounds that he had dethroned an international terrorist was, if not exactly a fool, at least badly fooled. And Shenkman's book provides a long list of other cases in which the same conclusion might be drawn.
Virtually no one, Shenkman says, has "explored what the public's approval of the war on the basis of misinformation says about the maturity of our democracy." He explores it. He believes that for a combination of reasons, spot TV ads prominent among them, the American electorate harbors more misconceptions about public life than it did a generation ago, or at almost any period in American history.
I wish I had some evidence from the current presidential campaign that the voters are finally beginning to pay attention and judge what they hear on the basis of real knowledge. Sadly, I don't. The electorate seems all too ready to accept Democratic arguments that John McCain wants the Iraq War to last 100 years, when McCain has said nothing of the sort. McCain keeps telling the electorate, and convincing a significant part of it, that Barack Obama's economic plan would raise taxes on the middle class, when every reputable analysis makes clear it wouldn't do that. This campaign provides Shenkman with almost as much ammunition as the last one.
What Shenkman does not do is chortle, Mencken-like, about stupidity. He offers plausible suggestions for how the knowledge level of the American electorate might be raised to a respectable threshold. He wants to return civics to the basic curriculum in both high school and college, and to test for it. He thinks that pollsters should ask questions that get at how much the voters know, not just what they think. If the pollsters won't do that, he says, foundations should do it and pay for it.
"We can have a smart electorate," Shenkman writes on the last page of his book. That is by far the most optimistic sentence anywhere in the volume. I think he's right. It won't require candidates to give stump speeches berating the voters as fools. But it will require some painful thinking about what a "rational voter" really is and how we might go about making more of them.
Alan Ehrenhalt is executive editor of Governing magazine and author of "The United States of Ambition" and "The Lost City."
© 2008
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