Little disgusts me more than the praising of the “swing voter” or “moderate,” who is not “fair and balanced” (most of the time)*, but rather is ignorant of politics. Worst, because of peoples’ malleability in areas they don’t think about much (politics is often one of them), they are likely to have simply picked up the leftist beliefs they were taught in school and by the media. Part of the reason Bush is so leftist on domestic issues (ie being in support of large spending increases, pro-open borders, pro-affirmative action, anti-‘racial profiling,’ soft on gun control, etc) is because a significant number, if not the majority, of the vaunted “swing voters” and “middle Americans” are leftists themselves, due to a combination of ignorance and apathy about politics and a leftist school system and media.
Here is an article about the myth of the virtuousness of swing voters.
As to the political malleablity of the average person, who does not think about politics much, read this article excerpt (from “Verbal Reports on Mental Processes”, Nisbett and Wilson, Psychological Review, 1977, p. 236). The study in the excerpt (Goethals and Reckman, 1973) shows that peoples’ opinons can be easily changed on controversial issues (busing to force racial integration in the schools was a major controversial issue in 1973 when the study was done). Moreover, the study shows people do not even realize that their opinions have been changed.
“[I]nvestigators assessed the opinions of high school students on 30 social issues, including attitudes toward busing of schoolchildren to achieve racial integration. One to two weeks later, students were called and asked to participate in a group discussion of the busing issue. Each group was composed of three subjects whose pretest opinions indicated that they were all pro-busing or all anti-busing, plus one high school student confederate who was armed with a number of persuasive opinions and whose job it was to argue persistently against the opinion held by all other group members. He was highly successful in this task. Following the discussion, subjects indicated their opinions on the busing issue–on a scale different in form from the original measure. The original anti-busing subjects had their opinions sharply moderated in a pro-direction. Most of the pro-busing subjects were actually converted to an anti-busing position. Then Goethals and Reckman asked their subjects to recall, as best they could, what their original opinions on the busing question had been. Subjects were reminded that the experimenters were in possession of the original opinion scale and would check the accuracy of the subjects’ recall. Control subjects were able to recall their original opinions with high accuracy. In contrast, among experimental subjects, the original anti-busing subjects “recalled” their opinions as having been much more pro-busing than they actually were, while the original pro-busing subjects actually recalled their original opinions as having been, on the average, anti-busing! In fact, the original pro-busing subjects recalled that they had been more anti-busing than the original anti-busing subjects recalled they had been.”
*Yes, I know Godless is a “swing voter,” but he is definintely a special case. Most “swing voters” are not sitting around studying h-bd issues and reading extensively about politics. Also (at least it seems to me), the reason (in addition to social/religous issues) that Godless is not in a hurry to vote straight-ticket Republican is that he sees the Republicans (especially GWB) as often being just as weak or weaker than the Dems on issues like immigration, affirmative action, and controlling the budget, which is a common ‘right-wing’ viewpoint.
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