Forgive Us, World
Via TBOGG I see that the amount of lead in our environment has finally reached critical mass.
Kimberly Parmer, 33, who works as a human resources manager in western Michigan, said the emphasis on national security issues had distorted the campaign.
“I don’t think terrorism is as big a threat as everyone is making it out to be,” Ms. Parmer said. “Yes, we have had a couple of incidents, but other countries have hundreds every year. Iraq is important, but so are things like Social Security and Medicare. Neither one has really touched on those subjects because no one is going to be happy, no matter what you do.”
Ms. Parmer, who said she is firmly planted in “the very low middle class,” also saw the Bush tax cut as poorly timed. She normally votes for Democrats, she said, but is not sure this time.
“One is too polished; the other one, I think to be honest, I don’t know how he ever got to be president,” Ms. Parmer said. “I am really surprised he has gotten as far as he has in life. I do think he’s honest.”
Even so, Ms. Parmer said, she thought she might vote for Mr. Bush. “If you actually look at him, and he stands up next to Kerry, you just kind of feel sorry for him,” she said. “I feel he’s more of an underdog, he’s had a hard go of it in the last four years.”
As we all sit here pondering how it can possibly be that Commander Codpiece is even in the running, this explains it. I think that what gets me the most about people like this is that they obviously pay a certain amount of attention, they know what the issues are yet they see the world as if it’s a TV soap opera.
I’ll bet this woman will vote for Bush. Here’s why. According to the LA Times Poll today:
In its final days, the race is blurring some of the electorate’s familiar divides but emphatically deepening others, according to the poll.
Much smaller than in recent presidential elections is the gender gap, in which the majority of men usually vote Republican, and women usually lean Democratic.
Bush’s message, which stresses his national security record and his commitment to conservative cultural values, is helping him gain ground among lower middle-income and less-educated voters ambivalent about his economic record. Conversely, the message is costing him with more affluent and better-educated families that have historically supported Republicans.
Strikingly, Bush leads Kerry in the poll among lower- and middle-income white voters, but trails his rival among whites earning at least $100,000 per year.
Bush also runs best among voters without college degrees, whereas Kerry leads not only among college-educated women (a traditional Democratic constituency), but among college-educated men — usually one of the electorate’s most reliably Republican groups in the electorate.
This tracks with the PIPA Survey which said:
As the nation prepares to watch the presidential candidates debate foreign policy issues, a new PIPA-Knowledge Networks poll finds that Americans who plan to vote for President Bush have many incorrect assumptions about his foreign policy positions. Kerry supporters, on the other hand, are largely accurate in their assessments. The uncommitted also tend to misperceive Bush’s positions, though to a smaller extent than Bush supporters, and to perceive Kerry’s positions correctly. Steven Kull, director of PIPA, comments: “What is striking is that even after nearly four years President Bush’s foreign policy positions are so widely misread, while Senator Kerry, who is relatively new to the public and reputed to be unclear about his positions, is read correctly.”
When the inevitable forums and roundtables of beltway “intellectuals” chewing over the election coverage and results take place over the next few months, I would very much like to see somebody ask William Kristol and his buds over at the Weakly Standard and AEI how they square their grand global vision with the fact that the vast number of their followers are total morons. Indeed, the country seems to have divided up rather neatly into the dumbshits vs. everybody else and they represent the dumbshits. Do the cosmopolitan neocon elite believe that a country run on behalf of people like this can actually run the world? If they do, then all the hoo-hah about their Straussian allegiance was true.
