Wednesday, April 29, 2009

Figured That Out, Did You?

I could mock Byron York's opinion piece in the Washington Examiner, where he seems to be stating that President Obama's overwhelming support within the African-American community makes current polling numbers somehow unreliable.

But David Weigel, over at The Washington Independent, does a much better job than I ever could.

Sometimes things are best left to the professionals.

In fairness to York, his point seemed to be that while African-Americans support President Obama personally, they might not actually be as in favor of his policies as that support suggests, and so using approval numbers to gauge support for policy might produce skewed results. But, if that was his point, he made it so poorly that it's a marvel the column made it into print. And of course, that would also raise the question of whether or not personal (or racial) antipathy on the part of much more numerous White voters would have the opposite effect. So perhaps a more intelligent piece would simply have dealt with the difficulty of assessing support for policy solely by attempting to judge the popularity of the policy maker. But where's the controversy in that?

2 comments:

Catnapping said...

good god. funny how no white men's numbers are skewed cuz of personal support by white voters.

well. you know them coloured folks. theyz alot like me and my family. (we'z a bunch a drunk indyuns.)

we don't know nuthin' bout book-learned politics. we'z only votin' on whether we gets that welfare check and free booze.

that piece york wrote was racist. period. did it not occur to york that 90% of "blacks" are democrat? of course not. he's so into skin tones, he doesn't care.

if he wanted to see if race was actually a factor, then he should have only read the figures from polled white dems and black dems, and then compared THEIR numbers...

and even then...excuse me, but there are different sorts of dems. i know of a nest of dems on KFS who are racist as hell....yellowdogs, I think they're called.

so. how about polling folks to find out just what their views are on particular policies...and THEN, of that group, split by races...and see THEN if there are any differences between, er, objective, political support and personal support.

see if there'z any folks supportin' obama just cuz he's the same colour 'n all.

Catnapping said...

reading comments...maine guy nailed something that didn't even occur to me:

Unless blacks make up a disproportionately high percentage of the respondants to the poll, the result exactly reflects the overall popularity of the policy.