Barack Obama: The Information Gap

The pundits are trying to break down Tuesday’s results. The conventional wisdom seems to be that Clinton did and does better among lower income, less educated voters because they trust her more to implement legislation that will help them directly, whereas more affluent voters aren’t in danger of losing their homes or going bankrupt, so they are free to vote with their hearts. If you ignore that this theory relies on the false emotion/concrete idea distinction that has emerged in this election, it sounds plausible. But it sure imputes a lot of rational thought to the decisions of uneducated voters. I have another theory that I think is a little better, but no pundit will ever adopt my theory because it's about no one giving a shit about pundits and it basically calls uneducated people uninformed.

I think that Barack Obama may be suffering from an information gap. I did not think this was possible until recently. I had assumed that everyone who votes in a primary is well-informed about the election. But that is because I live in a sealed chamber of news and punditry. I read articles about the election all day at work, and then I come home and watch MSNBC for hours. Right now I am even blogging about it in a post that I began writing on a Saturday afternoon. People like me tend to forget that most people could give a shit about politics. We forget that for many, it's not a sport, but a chore. Many avoid most real news and coverage of the candidates because it's boring (and maybe because it's a little debased). However many people like this vote, at least in general elections, and with the 2008 Democratic primary being treated by the country almost as though it is a general election, many of them are voting in the 2008 primaries. Their votes are decided by a combination of the headlines they have been unable to escape, word of mouth (who friends and family are voting for and why), and things like name recognition. I don't think it's too much to assume that these low-information voters are less likely to be college educated than high-information voters.

That is where Obama's information gap comes in. The well-known campaign narratives of experience v. emotion and 'Will this teenage negro whiz-kid be ready to lead the country on Day One?' distort reality and hurt Obama's chances, while Clinton benefits greatly from the fact that everyone is already very familiar with her. That is the above-board, easily-recognized information gap.

But there may be a more insidious information gap taking place by word of mouth on the level that people whisper to each other, addressing topics that they think might not be addressed by the mainstream media out of political correctness. Specifically, I am talking about one thing.

A few days ago, I was talking about the primaries with a friend who had been torn over who to vote for. One of her slights against Obama was that he is a Muslim. Not a secret Muslim who is going to take off a mask and reveal a big, bushy beard at his inauguration as part of an absurd conspiracy, but just a Muslim. This is a fairly smart person with a high income, albeit one who doesn't see the fun in politics that I do (so she is one of the minority of low-information voters who are relatively well-off). I was shocked to learn that, outside of my cocoon of punditry, normal people believe this. When I set her straight, she said that his campaign hadn't done enough to tell voters otherwise (I will get to this in a minute). And I can see how one could mistakenly think that the mainstream media's political correctness is so broad that it somehow wouldn't talk non-stop about this topic if it were true.

So the world of the low information voter can be one where a smear campaign succeeds because the voter simply assumes that the media will not address the topic at all out of political correctness. (I should qualify this with my own political correctness. I easily call the Muslim meme a smear campaign not because I think that being Muslim is awful, but because a huge portion of the American electorate does.) Now, I know that it almost sounds silly that someone would believe Obama to be a Muslim, but think again of Hillary's education gap. Who is more likely to decide who to vote for because of a bit of information like this told by a friend? An educated voter or an uneducated one? And who is less likely to understand that, while we may soon elect a female or black president, we will never ever elect a non-Christian president (except for maybe a secular Jewish philanthropist who is basically an ordained minister of America's true religion, capitalism).

I think that this may also help explain why Obama has been doing so well in caucuses. The conventional wisdom is that he does well in caucuses because he has more young, dedicated volunteers. This certainly helps, but a caucus also gives the better-informed people in the room a chance to give others the legitimate arguments for their candidate and ferret out the lies.

Obama's problem with the information gap, and the Muslim meme, is that there may be nothing he can do to stop it during the primaries. The natural way to combat this would be by showcasing his Christianity. However, doing that would invite questions about Obama's church, which is so fervently black that once people know about it, it will scare white people in a way that--because it is true--could be worse than some stupid, whispered smear campaign. And more importantly, it would alienate the Democratic Party's heathen base. If Obama started making a lot of Jesus talk, the most liberal voters--who he controls a good percentage of--would vote for Hillary instead. All he can do is try to win the primary on honest grounds, and hope to somehow inform the willfully uninformed.

Then, when the general election rolls around, Barack can destroy the Muslim meme and steal Huckavoters at the same time (assuming that Huck's not McCain's VP candidate). Appearing in a lot of churches during the general election (white churches, so as not to scare people) will not alienate Democrats from voting for him, and comparing his Democratic Jesusy compassion with the cold-heartedness of Admiral McCain, his surgically-enhanced USC sorority girl wife, and the inevitable non-Mormon, CEO, Romneyesque-but-less-detestable running mate, will even appeal to the religious. But, in the meantime all he can do during the primaries is send a billion college kids to go knock on doors in Texas.

And just going back to how I don't think conventional theories explain voting patterns very well. Although there is absolutely no science involved in punditry and it is all conjecture, I see a problem with it that closely mirrors the problem with traditional economics. A few years ago, some economists began to realize that everything they believed relied on the idea that people are rational, when we very obviously are not. Similarly, pundits analyze elections with the assumption that voters are somewhat rational and well-informed, when that is obviously not how things work. Pundits just don't want to admit that no one cares about their work and alienate potential readers by calling them stupid.