Thursday, November 20, 2008

How Obama Got Elected

Hey! I'm actually focusing on writing. It's still slow going, but a lot of stuff is happening in the places where I am. If that makes any sense.

So. Short blog posts or, in this case, a video are the order of the day. I first saw this a couple of days ago. Some say it's about "stupid" Obama voters, but I think it's more a picture of the influence of the media, the state of our culture today, and something of an indictment on our public educational system, which I don't think stresses the importance of knowing what's going on, how government works, etc., nearly enough.

It's part of a project by John Ziegler to produce a documentary called How Obama Got Elected. On election day 12 Obama voters were interviewed after they left the polls for the purpose of learning how media impacted their knowledge. They were chosen, says the website, "for their apparent intelligence/verbal abilities and willingness to express their opinions to a large audience." Ziegler also commissioned a Zogby telephone poll of 512 Obama voters using the same questions (you can read more about those results on the website.) In most cases the questions were multiple choice among the 4 presidential and vice-presidential candidates.

The video, below, is about 9 minutes long, but quite fascinating. (Feedblitz subscribers: I think you'll have to click on the blog post title to take you to the blog itself to view the video)




What's especially striking to me today, is, as important as the presidential election is, even more important is knowing who God is, and I suspect if a similar sort of poll were conducted involving basic questions regarding God's essence and nature the results would be even worse. And for the same reason, which is that mostly people are involved in themselves and the small details of their own lives, content to accept without question information that affirms their pre-existing ideas, and not terribly interested in investigating information that doesn't.

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