Day: December 8, 2008

Poll: Education Level, Not Race, Drove Prop 8 Win

Jon Ponder

The 2008 election introduced “low information voters” — people who don’t educate themselves about political issues until the waning days of a campaign. Now it appears that it was this group — not blacks and Latinos, as was originally suggested in early post-election analysis — that put Proposition 8, the anti-gay marriage amendment, over the top last month in California.
Fifty-seven percent of voters with a college degree opposed the amendment, while 69 percent of voters whose education had stopped after gradating high school cast their vote in favor of rescinding marriage equality.
A survey released last week by Public Policy Institute of California (PPI) of voters found that the true determining factor in who voted for Prop 8 was not ethnicity. It was education level:

Blacks, widely reported to have voted 70 percent in favor in rescinding marriage rights for gay and lesbian families, were shown in the poll … to be markedly less supportive of the amendment than originally believed.

At the same time, a higher percentage of Latinos turned out to be in favor of restricting marriage rights: 61 percent, according to the new poll, which surveyed 2,003 California residents.

The overall numbers, as determined by the poll, show that 48 percent of Californians remain opposed to marriage equality for gays and lesbians, with 47 percent in favor of restoring marriage equality.

The most important single demographic difference between supporters of the amendment and advocates of marriage parity, however, is one of education and income, according to Mark Baldassare, the president of the Public Policy Institute of California.

The article cited Baldassare as saying that 57 percent of voters with a college degree opposed the amendment, while 69 percent of voters whose education had stopped after gradating high school cast their vote in favor of rescinding marriage equality.

Said Baldassare, “Both among whites and non-whites, among college graduates and among upper-income voters, Prop. 8 lost.”

Continued Baldassare, “Among both whites and non-whites, among non-college graduates and lower-income voters, Prop. 8 won.

“It seems to me that some of what we attributed to race and ethnic differences really had to do with a socioeconomic divide in regard to same-sex marriage.”

In July, a Field Poll showed that Prop 8 was losing 51 percent to 42 percent, but that was before the Yes on 8 campaign began barraging voters with misleading ads. One ad claimed that if the amendment failed, churches that refused to perform gay marriages would lose their tax exempt status. Another claimed that school children would be recruited in to homosexuality by being forced to learn about gay marriage.

Never mind that the rights of churches are broadly protected by the U.S. Constitution or that is silly to think that a gay couple would want to have their wedding at church filled with homophobes. And when the state superintendent of schools appeared in an ad stating that the claim that gay marriage would be taught in schools was false, Yes on 8 responded with an ad calling him a “liberal politician.

Based on the PPI poll, it appears that the operatives behind Prop 8 made a cynical calculation that they could fool half the people this time. Sadly, but not surprisingly, they were right.

Bonus Quote du Jour

Buck Banks

Huh. No. It doesn’t say that at all.

— Former Clinton strategist Mark Penn, in an interview with the Independent, denying he wrote a memo during the campaign that claimed Barack Obama was “unelectable.”

Penn elaborates: “Those memos, right, that came out, were really … er, were really, I think, show you, you know, just a piece, because … a small part, a piece of how we were looking to, I think, set up or solve the fact that he was a very strong candidate.”

Supremes: Obama is Hawaiian and, by Extension, American

Buck Banks

citizenship.jpg

Despite the best efforts of chronic self-loathers Justice Clarence Thomas and perpetual sore loser Alan Keyes, the U.S. Supreme Court has refused to hear an emergency appeal of a suit brought by some crank named Leo Donofrio claiming that president-elect Barack Obama is not a U.S. citizen.

Donofrio claimed that because Obama’s Kenyan father had British citizenship, Barack Obama Jr. was British, not American, although his mother was both a U.S. citizen and was physically in Hawaii — by most accounts a U.S. state at the time — when she birthed him, or as they said in the movie “Mandingo,” she “slipped a suckah.”

Apparently, no one but Donofrio was surprised at the ruling:

“This is the least surprising move by the Supreme Court in years,” said CBS News legal analyst Andrew Cohen. “No serious legal scholar believed that the Justices would take the case and overturn the election.”

Another crackpot, Phillip J. Berg, contends that Obama is actually a citizen of Kenya and Indonesia, apparently believing that if one spends any length of time in a country, one automatically becomes a citizen thereof. Berg’s suit looks like it is going the way of Donofrio’s and several other nuisance suits challenging Obama’s citizenship status.

But, invoking the “one-drop rule,” almost everyone agrees that Obama is a black man, even though he spent nine months in a white woman’s womb.

Rove Hawks Book by Threatening to Expose Bush-Haters. Huh?

Trish

The two chums, back in the day

All we can say is, Karl Rove must be writing a very long book.

The man widely credited with Bush’s two presidential victories says his new book will include an accounting of those in Washington who never accepted the president as a legitimate commander-in-chief.

“I’ve got behind-the-scenes episodes that are going to show how unreceiving they were of this man as president of the United States,” Rove told Cox News in an interview published Sunday. “I’m going to name names and show examples.”

I wonder if I’ll be in there. Having never met Karl Rove and not being in Washington, I doubt it, but you never know. If the White House’s domestic spying is as good as I think it is, I might have a shot.

Still, it seems like it would be an easier task to name the names of those who regarded Bush as legit, not the other way around. What would that be, maybe a dozen or so folks? Karl Rove, Jeff Gannon, Harriet Miers, um…maybe some of the members of the Bush cabinet? Wait, I doubt it. They, of all people, know what a doofus he truly is.