Our Muslim President
Call me an optimist, but I just can't find it in me to believe that so many of my fellow Americans (now 24%, according to Newsweek) actually believe that President Obama is a Muslim. Don't these polls wind up sort of perpetuating the opinions they're designed to gauge just by posing the question? In other words, a man or woman sitting by his or her phone (and they don't call people with cell phones very often, incidentally, so grain of salt with all of these polls) has to wonder: Why would Obama not be a Muslim if Newsweek, The New York Times, or CNN is asking me this question? Nobody ever asked me if President Bush was a Muslim. Just by being asked, the question is given weight."Does Obama want the terrorists to win?" "Is he the Antichrist?" "Is he a Martian preparing to harvest the organs of our most accomplished athletes?" Aren't the results of these types of questions also just a reflection of the chief executive's current approval rating? If a person being polled doesn't like the subject person of the poll, and he or she is even a little bit fired up about it, that person is just going to choose the most negative response options possible during the phone poll, whether they actually believe their statement or not. They may not actually believe it, but they're savvy enough to want to skew the poll results for other purposes, and now here's their chance when the phone rings in the den on an otherwise dull evening.
Accepting any poll results at face value assumes a terrific amount of honesty, and purity of motive, on the part of those being polled, and it assumes also-- frequently incorrectly-- that people have a high level of respect for the pollster, yet the media organizations that are identifying themselves at the beginning of each of these inquiries don't poll very well themselves.
There is a point to be made with these results in respect to how certain high-profile media types have worked to perpetuate inaccuracies behind some pretty poorly-disguised political motivations, but saying that you think Barack Obama is a Muslim may not mean that you actually believe it. It may only mean that you like Glenn Beck and Sarah Palin more than you like Obama, and now you've taken your chance to choose sides in the media-perpetuated horse race. A question relating to factual information has been transformed into a question of political opinion.
That's still terribly troubling that race-baiting and demagoguery work so successfully, but it's the national news media, as much as the population in general, that has to wise up about this. The major news outlets still act too often as if it's their responsibility to "report without bias"-- which is still as fundamentally impossible as it ever has been-- instead of slashing through the now-incredibly sophisticated political misdirection campaigns that produce these type of poll results.
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Also, Obama's tone-deaf political team keeps falling into the same trap with all this right-wing name-calling. Like being branded a "liberal" or a "Socialist," they just deny and deny, and never bother to mix in the suggestion that it would be OK even if he were one of these things. (Of course, he is far from either of those.) It's the business of politics, and the right-wing has been highly-successful at damaging the brand names of opposing philosophies through their business. Obama may not be a Muslim any more than he's a Socialist or even a liberal, but what the fuck if he was?
posted by CM @ 8:50 PM
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