Lying To Make Friends

Often times, when reading poll numbers or looking at election results, I have to face the fact that my obsession with politics and rabid partisanship makes me different from most Americans.  Particularly difficult to accept, though, is my recent realization that I’m more insanely partisan than the modern Republican Party.

DailyKos recently commissioned a poll to gauge just how of touch rank and file Republicans are with reality.  And the answer is:  very.  Only 42% of Republicans say President Obama was born in the United States, compared to 36% who say he was not and 22% who aren’t sure.  Twenty-three percent of Republicans believe their state should secede from the Union, 39% believe Obama should impeached (which isn’t suprising, since 63% believe he’s a Socialist, 31% believe he’s a racist who hates people, and 24% believe he wants the terrorists to win), and 21% believe ACORN stole the 2008 election.

But there’s one number in the poll that’s been getting a lot of attention that strikes me as being surprisingly low.  Fifty-three percent of Republicans believe that Sarah Palin is more qualified to be President than Barack Obama.  Obviously, I disagree with these people on the relative qualifications of Obama and Palin.  But my disagreement is more with the simple fact that they’re Republicans and not how they judge qualifications for elected office.  On the latter issue, I’m probably more in line with the Republicans who answered Palin than the Republicans who answered Obama.   While there are many seemingly objective factors by which one could say President Obama is more qualified than Sarah Palin–intelligence, temperment, worldliness, etc.–none of these matter as much to me as the fact he’s right and she’s wrong on the major issues a president has to deal with.  If I were a Republican who conceded the objective grounds for Obama’s superior qualification but agreed entirely with Palin on matters of policy, I would no doubt be among the 53% of my party saying she is more qualified than Obama.

To give an extreme example, even after the absurd revelations of the past few weeks, if a pollster were to ask me who I considered more qualified to be president, John Edwards or a generic but respectable Republican like, say, Orrin Hatch, I’d have to go with Edwards.  From my perspective, thinking about issues in the right way, starting with the correct baseline assumptions and principles and reaching the correct results, is the single most important qualification for an elected official.

-AR