And, no, this is not about The Who's Tommy. It's about someone who seems to be just as deaf, dumb, and blind, but by choice: Bryan York of the Washington Examiner. Back on Tuesday he wrote an article that started like this:
On his 100th day in office, Barack Obama enjoys high job approval
ratings, no matter what poll you consult. But if a new survey by
the
New York Times is accurate, the president and some of his policies are
significantly less popular with white Americans than with black
Americans,
and his sky-high ratings among African-Americans make some
of his positions appear a bit more popular overall than they actually
are.
Emphasis added. In the end, the article is about how Obama's high positives in the African-American community allegedly skew the results of opinion polls. Now, some people have called Bryan a racist. I don't think I would go that far. I do think the guy's either dumb (doesn't know wtf he's talking about) or disingenuous (knows wtf he's talking about but insists in making a flawed argument). And my two main problems with it are these.
First, let's take a look at that quote. There are a number of issues for which you could write pretty much the same thing. Like
On his 100th day in office, Barack Obama enjoys high job approval
ratings, no matter what poll you consult. But if a new survey by the
New York Times is accurate, the president and some of his policies are
significantly less popular with gun owners and the NRA than with pro-gun control Americans. and his sky-high ratings among pro-gun control Americans make some
of his positions appear a bit more popular overall than they actually
are.
Or how about this:
On his 100th day in office, Barack Obama enjoys high job approval
ratings, no matter what poll you consult. But if a new survey by the
New York Times is accurate, the president and some of his policies are
significantly less popular with anti-abortion Americans than with pro-choice
Americans, and his sky-high ratings among pro-choice Americans make some
of his positions appear a bit more popular overall than they actually
are.
Get my point? And what's more pathetic, Bryan goes out of his way to point out that African-Americans overwhelmingly support a Democratic President over a Republican one (I know, I'm utterly shocked too) but he argues that it's because he's Black.
I looked at the poll, which you can find by following one of the previous links, and although African-American support for Obama is higher than, say, African-American support for Bill Clinton, I really can't say it's that much higher. Why? Because African-Americans were already overwhelmingly Democratic.
Now, if Bill Richardson had become President and you started seeing those numbers from the Latino community, I'd agree that yes, as a group, we drank the Kool-Aid.
The second issue, which I find more offensive, is the suggestion that African-American's opinion of Obama should be discounted because they are more strongly in his corner. If that's the case, then we need to find out where the recalcitrant White racist fringe is in this poll and adjust the poll out. Don't want to go that far? Fair enough. Lets find out who out of those self-described Republicans would never say anything positive about Obama no matter what happens and lets adjust the poll by removing them out.
If the suggestion is that sectors that overwhelmingly support President Obama need to be removed from the poll because they skew the results, doing the same thing for those sector that overwhelmingly oppose him should balance things out.
But the real reason the poll doesn't need to be adjusted at all is this (and this may be a news flash for some): African-Americans are people too and their opinion, individually and collectively, count just as much as anyone else's.
Like I said, the guy isn't racist. He's the worse kind of blind man out there:the kind that sees only what he wants to see.
