{"id":4488,"date":"2014-11-19T09:42:49","date_gmt":"2014-11-19T16:42:49","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/lastbestnews.com\/site\/?p=4488"},"modified":"2014-11-19T09:44:23","modified_gmt":"2014-11-19T16:44:23","slug":"from-the-outpost-on-stupid-voters-present-company-excepted","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/2014\/11\/from-the-outpost-on-stupid-voters-present-company-excepted\/","title":{"rendered":"From the Outpost: On stupid voters (present company excepted)"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"David<\/a>

David Crisp<\/p><\/div>\n

Jonathan Gruber got himself\u2014and the Obama administration\u2014into trouble last week when a tape surfaced in which he referred to the \u201cstupidity of the American voter.\u201d<\/p>\n

The context made it worse. Mr. Gruber, an economist at MIT who had a hand in writing the Affordable Care Act, praised lack of transparency about the bill and said that it was written in a \u201ctortured way\u201d so the Congressional Budget Office would not score the individual mandate as a tax.<\/p>\n

Let\u2019s stipulate two things: If American voters are stupid, then Jonathan Gruber is one of the stupidest. You don\u2019t trash the wisdom of the electorate in public without taking a beating for it.<\/p>\n

Second, let\u2019s stipulate that you and I are not among the stupid voters, if stupid voters exist. The fact that you are reading this\u2014actual words on paper\u2014separates us from the crowd who can\u2019t handle anything more complex than a text message. So we\u2019re OK, but don\u2019t you wonder sometimes about everybody else?<\/p>\n

As for Mr. Gruber\u2019s actual remarks, I\u2019m having trouble understanding where the news is. The debate over the individual mandate was all over the news when the act was being drafted. It\u2019s hard to believe that anybody paying attention, especially the CBO, didn\u2019t know what was at stake.<\/p>\n

And as for lack of transparency, there was plenty to go around. Sarah Palin, once a Republican candidate for vice president, famously, and falsely, claimed that the bill included death panels. U.S. Rep. Joe Wilson, R-S.C., even more famously shouted \u201cYou lie!\u201d when President Obama said, accurately, in a State of the Union message that the bill did not provide coverage for illegal immigrants.<\/p>\n

But the stupidity of politicians is not at stake here. That was settled long ago. The question is this: How stupid are the voters who elect those stupid politicians?<\/p>\n

Evidence that many voters are clueless about government abounds. The Annenberg Public Policy Center reports two two-thirds of Americans cannot name all three branches of government. A Gallup poll released in September found that fewer than 40 percent of Americans could name which party controlled each house of Congress.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s hard to characterize this month\u2019s election as a throw-the-bums-out mandate if most Americans don\u2019t know which bums are in.<\/p>\n

\"CapreAir_Variable\"<\/a><\/div><\/div>As late as April 2013, the Kaiser Health Tracking Poll found that 42 percent of Americans didn\u2019t know that Obamacare was the law of the land. About 65 percent of Americans can\u2019t name a single Supreme Court justice. More than a third don\u2019t know what century the American Revolution took place in.<\/p>\n

On the same day that Sean Hannity was on talk radio\u2014where stupid people go to get their news\u2014blasting Mr. Gruber for denigrating the intelligence of the American voter, Glenn Beck was on talk radio playing tapes of college students failing miserably to answer such questions as, \u201cWho won the Civil War?\u201d and \u201cWho is vice president?\u201d<\/p>\n

Hannity himself used to regularly feature person-on-the-street interviews in which Americans routinely flunked answers to similar questions. Of course, he had a simple explanation: Those people were liberals.<\/p>\n

In the world of Sean Hannity and Rush Limbaugh, calling liberal voters stupid is quite a different thing than calling conservative voters stupid. Since Mr. Gruber\u2019s remarks surfaced on Nov. 10, they have been mentioned on FOX News 779 times, according to the Tampa Bay Times\u2019 PunditFact. CNN has mentioned Mr. Gruber only 27 times.<\/p>\n

Public ignorance spreads well beyond political hot buttons. A recent survey showed that most Americans think chief executive officers earn about $30 for every dollar average workers make. In reality, CEOs make $354 for every dollar the average worker makes\u2014by far the highest disparity in the world.<\/p>\n

A broader survey compared public knowledge to actual statistics on matters such as the murder rate, number of Muslims, voting and so on. The United States ranked second from the bottom among developed countries, beating out only Italy in terms of national ignorance.<\/p>\n

This month\u2019s election results also showed a gap between what Americans say they want and what they vote for. In Montana, 57 percent of voters rejected a Republican-backed initiative to end voter registration on Election Day, even while electing Republican majorities. While Republicans were sweeping into control of both houses of Congress, voters in four states supported increases in the minimum wage, a position that Republicans generally oppose.<\/p>\n

Certainly, candidates for public office act like they think voters are stupid. All those negative, nearly content-free ads that ran on TV before the election? They weren\u2019t aimed at you and me; they were aimed at stupid people.<\/p>\n

At the very least, American voters have, let\u2019s say, complicated attitudes toward the facts. We can take hope from the theory of the wisdom of crowds, the idea that even though individuals may not know much, they tend in the aggregate to stumble toward wise decisions.<\/p>\n

Failing that, there is consolation in speculating that most Americans who haven\u2019t heard of Obamacare or Antonin Scalia probably were among the two-thirds of U.S. voters who stayed home this Election Day.<\/p>\n

As for the rest of us, how dumb can we be? Just look whom we elected.<\/p>\n

David Crisp has worked for newspapers since 1979. He has been editor and publisher of the Billings Outpost since 1997.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Jonathan Gruber got himself\u2014and the Obama administration\u2014into trouble last week when a tape surfaced in which he referred to the \u201cstupidity of the American voter.\u201d The context made it worse. Mr. Gruber, an economist at MIT who had a hand in writing the Affordable Care Act, praised lack of transparency about the bill and said […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":4489,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[14],"tags":[1665,1667,1669,1664,278,1668,1666,716],"class_list":["post-4488","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news","tag-annenberg-public-policy-center","tag-glenn-beck","tag-joe-wilson","tag-jonathan-gruber","tag-obamacare","tag-rush-limbaugh","tag-sean-hannity","tag-supreme-court","prominence-category-featured"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4488","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4488"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4488\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/4489"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4488"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4488"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4488"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}