Yeah, the poll's about health care, but there are some serious lessons not only about the health care debate, but the current debate on the situation in Wisconsin, and, more than likely, whatever our next big debate will be as well.
Crossposted from Conversation 101
At some point, we just have to confront the fact that nobody’s interested in informing anymore:
Nearly half of all Americans believe the health care reform law has already been repealed or aren’t sure one way or the other, a new Kaiser Family Foundation poll shows.
Fifty-two percent of Americans believe — correctly — that the law has not been repealed, the poll shows. But 22 percent think the law has been repealed, and 26 percent aren’t sure.
The results come after a month of conflicting headlines: Republicans successfully voted to repeal the law in the House; repeal failed in the Senate; some judges have struck down the law; other judges have upheld it. And House Republicans defunded part of the law in their continuing resolution — which the Senate hasn’t addressed yet.
Drew Altman, president and CEO of the Kaiser Family Foundation, chalks the confusion up to busy lives, media headlines and, in some cases, hope.
“There may be some partisan wishful thinking going on,” he writes in a column out today. “Thirty percent of Republicans think the law has been repealed while only 12 percent of Democrats do. But overall, it is obvious that the knowledge of basic civics is pretty low. Maybe it’s because ‘Schoolhouse Rock’ is no longer airing on Saturday morning TV explaining how government works.”
When we’re relying on campy elementary school cartoons to teach people what’s going on in the world, we’re in some serious shit, folks.
But this poll is really nothing new. We’ve seen time and time again how (unfortunately) uninformed we are as a country. I don’t think we’re all stupid, we’ve just been let down by a media culture more interested in covering conflict between people than conflict between ideas.
Take Wisconsin (please). Unfortunately, I learned as much about the conservative point of view regarding that situation in 20 minutes on the phone with E than I could in a week’s worth of watching cable news. And while the blogosphere and “new media” have the potential to be a an information-disseminating machine, its primary purpose seems to be boiling everything down to the least common denominator, then setting that denominator on fire and scattering its ashes all over the internet.
Memeorandum is a site I check in on pretty often. It’s a blog and news aggregator that uses some kind of mathematical hoodoo to compile the most popular political items on the web at any given time. Looking at it this morning was depressing. The most popular story was from Michelle Malkin’s site, a story about a “union thug” exerting some manner of thuggery upon a lovely young Tea Party organizer. It was downhill from there:
“Capuano ‘Bloody’ Comment Becomes Flash Point in Union Flap”
“Bad Jew!” (I don’t even know what this one’s about, I couldn’t bring myself to click on it, but remember, this is the third most linked to/commented on/talked about story in the political blogopshere according to memeorandum)
“New Tone: Democratic Congressman Urges Union Members to ‘Get Bloody’ with Tea Partiers.” Capuano again.
“Union Thuggery Descends on Freedom Works.”
“Anger and Loathing in Boston”
“The Left’s War on the Kochs”
You get the picture. It’s all demagoguery, plain and simple. None of this informs, none of this educates, none of this explains why anyone thinks they’re right. All we read nowadays (those of us still plugged in enough to read, that is) is what’s wrong with “them.” It’s not why we’re righteous, it’s why “they” are wrong.
It would be hard for the situation in Wisconsin to have less to do with Rep. Capuano of Massachussetts. Yet among the 7 most popular stories on the internet about Wisconsin, 3 of them deal directly with him and his comments.
The debate about Wisconsin (with very few exceptions) has been perverted into a long, sad rendition of “this is why they suck.” There’s been hardly anything about the role of unions today, about what Gov. Walker should be doing about the budget gap, about the actual ideological differences that still lie at the heart of this story. Real stuff is in there somewhere. The problem is we’re made to dig through a cubic shitload of nonsensical hay in order to find the needle.
So, you get what Kaiser found. The health care debate was about health care the same way The Godfather was about olive oil importing. Until people who have been given a platform to disseminate information use it to do that, we’re just going to keep repeating the same off-topic arguments until we just finally put the Koch Brothers and George Soros in Thunderdome and settle this thing once and for all.
In the meantime, we’ll just keep on knowing less and less, and letting our fights be fought by the 5% on either wing. It’s the American way.