The Fallacy of TIME’s Folklore ‘04

Today was a big travel day as I was headed to the Left Coast for Thanksgiving with the ‘rents and some family friends. As such, I did a lot of reading on the plane, particularly of the most recent TIME Magazine (11/22/04, “Street Fight”). It’s a good issue… lots of articles on important topics and not a lot of puff journalism (which infuriates me to no end).

Anyway, they had a small piece by Karen Tumulty titled “The Folklore of Election ‘04” which tried to lay a few of the misperceptions of the elections results to rest. I was with her for most of the way as she hit items such as the churchgoer vote and the youth vote… right up until the end, where she proceeded to blow it on poo-pooing the notion that the country has moved to the right on social issues.

Tumulty points to TIME poll numbers showing support for civil unions (60%) and stem cell research (69%), while showing opposition against abortion without consideration for the health of the mother (9% support).

I have several issues with this… first of all, TIME provides this data in a static manner, when the statement they are trying to debunk is dynamic in nature: what do the date show over time? How does it track? They also fail to provide any data on demographics… young Americans might have more liberal leanings on this issue, but they don’t possess much political clout and don’t vote in large numbers… who is doing the voting counts!

Secondly, citing poll numbers on the worse-case scenario of outlawed abortion isn’t really going to say much… the more pertinent (and important) issue is Roe v. Wade as a whole, and not how extreme you can take the issue. Besides, it is a judicial non-starter anyways (and I am personally appalled that a tenth of our populace supports that position).

The final main issue I had was Tumulty’s avoidance of the obvious question: if people are so damn moderate, why are they supporting an administration that adopts far-right stances on so many of these issues? Dubya’s stem cell position was supposed to be a moderation but ended up pleasing virtually nobody; he not only wants to overturn Roe v. Wade but also signed the late-term abortion bill which has no provision for the health of the mother; he supports homophobic positions and is to the far right on sex education and health issues… need I go on?

I’ll back off a little here at the end and say that it was obvious that the article was meant to be a simple capsule on these topics, so I shouldn’t really expect too much. But on the other hand, my rantings above seem to indicate that not all of those issues can be so neatly described.

An aside: The last topic addressed in the article was regarding all the internet conspiracy theories regarding a stolen election… I have no comment on what she said, but rather just wanted to comment that I have been trying to put together a post on this subject for some time, and that perhaps this will help spur me on….