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A rather cool website is PresidentsUSA.net, which calls itself “the most comprehensive site on the Internet for presidential resources.” There is a ton of information there, most of it linked from other sites, on everything from the births and deaths (and gravesite locations) of the presidents, to who vetoed what, members of their cabinets, copies of their tax returns, and what they did on the Fourth of July. (Zachary Taylor got sick from eating cherries and milk at a ceremony in Washington in 1850 and died a few days later. This perhaps explains the later popularity of marshmallows.)
One of my favorite pages on PresidentsUSA.net lists campaign slogans for presidential candidates, beginning with William Henry Harrison in 1840. As is evident from who actually won, some of the slogans were more effective than others. Eisenhower’s “I Like Ike” was a winner; so were “He Kept Us Out of War” (Woodrow Wilson) and "Vote Yourself a Farm" (Abraham Lincoln). But who remembers James Blaine, whose campaign mantra was, “Ma, Ma, Where’s My Pa? Gone to the White House, Ha, Ha, Ha”?
Lately, such sayings, or sound bites, if you will, seem to have become ubiquitous not just in political campaigning, but in governance itself, with short, simple strings of words standing in for big, complicated ideas. “Moral values,” “Stay the course,” “We will prevail,” “Blame game,” “Flip-flop”—I have heard some of these so many times that I am not sure I know what they mean anymore, assuming they ever meant anything at all. And yet some of my conversations, especially with younger people, and much of what I read in the newspaper seem to indicate that they are sometimes the only insights some Americans have on any given issue.
This scares me. Given the enormity of the challenges our country and the world find themselves faced with these days, one would like to think that “government by the people” involves a people that knows more or less what is going on.
In this month’s issue of Public Opinion Pros, we present two rather different perspectives on what—and whether—Americans are thinking about politics. In an analysis of political information based on data from the American National Election Studies, Stephen Bennett finds that if we were to grade the public on their knowledge of government and public affairs, nearly half would get an F. Asked to respond to factual questions about politics, survey respondents earn a mean score of 56 percent. Asked to state their positions on various issues, many say they don’t have one. Asked to explain their stated likes and dislikes for various presidential nominees and political parties, most are hard-pressed to give reasons. One might reasonably conclude that Americans are lacking in political intelligence.
In “Deliberation and Its Discontents,” on the other hand, Frank Rusciano portrays a public that is not lacking in political intelligence but, rather, has become unresponsive on issues because it is tired of having its intelligence insulted. “The general perception of many political leaders,” Rusciano writes regarding Americans’ knowledge of foreign relations, “is that the public is too unsophisticated to understand the nuances of international politics, and so their pronouncements generally simplify the issues beyond any relevance to decision-making. The public, in turn, declines to participate in simplistic discussions, leading the policymakers to assume a lack of citizen interest.” In his description of the latest of a series of National Issues Forums, or deliberative discussions, going back to 1987, Rusciano demonstrates how the opinions of citizens given an opportunity to read about and discuss different positions on foreign policy issues will move closer to those of opinion leaders (who presumably are better versed in the issues), as measured by the Chicago Council on Foreign Relations.
Despite the differing viewpoints, the two articles come to pretty much the same conclusion on what ought to be done. Bennett says that the way to increase political knowledge is to get people more interested in politics; Rusciano says people will be more interested in politics if they can be shown that ordinary citizens have it in them to participate in complex issues rather than being treated like simpletons.
How this can be brought about is quite another question, the answer to which will most likely not be found in a sound bite. Almost certainly, there is a role to be played by public opinion researchers, who are well-situated and well-equipped to inform the discussion on what it means to be informed, to continue to take the measure of what the public knows, and to look for inroads to their interests and intellects. It is an endless task with no determinable ending, but if we are to believe in government by the people, the education and engagement of the people in the problems and dangers of our times may be our only hope of saving ourselves from those dangers.
In the words of John F. Kennedy, “Let us begin.”
—Lisa Ferraro Parmelee, Editor |
