“Okay kids, who can tell me whose running for President?” I asked my study group at the inner city tutoring center where I volunteer.
“Someone named GOP!”
“No, you’re dumb. . .it’s some black guy. We’re going to vote for him because he’s black.”
The comments went on for another 5 minutes as to why you should vote for a woman instead of an African American or whether or not the old guy named “GOP” was an animal rights activist because one of the kids keeps seeing his picture with an elephant next to it.
If these were little kids, we’d laugh and get over it. These were middle schoolers and high schoolers. Half of them will vote in the next presidential election. They get their ideas from their parents and their peers–who are also sadly ignorant. I have never personally spoken with Barack Obama, and although I’ve met Hillary Clinton I didn’t ask her why someone should vote for her–but I strongly suspect that both candidates would not urge voters to consider voting for them on the merit of their gender or ethnicity.
Our population is sadly ignorant of issues and to further demonstrate my point I actually took an informal survey yesterday of political know how. I surveyed 50 people in my neighborhood. Now in fairness, I live in the inner city and the perspective is going to be skewed. I did try to get a good variety of people though–business types, as well as younger people. This is not an actual scientific survey and yet at the same time, I find that our political ignorance abounds. Here are a few things I found:
*Out of 50 people surveyed, not a single one knew that GOP was a reference to the Republican party.
*Slightly more than half of the people I surveyed knew that there were 3 candidates running for president. The vast majority of them thought the race was between Obama and Clinton.
*Most people didn’t know that Hillary is a U.S. Senator–which is sad considering that we are some of her constituents.
If you ask people why they’re voting the way they are (a taboo topic–I know) you’ll find that people give very superficial answers. I found that for people voting Democratically, almost every single one said they were voting based on Obama’s ethnicity or the fact that Hillary would be the first woman president–and they liked her husband.
So my goal here in Politics 101 is to educate. Not sure what Hillary means when she says she’s going to clean up her husband’s NAFTA mess? What’s all this reference to Obama’s “bitter” speech? What on earth are we talking about when we talk about bipartisan politics–and how does that really affect you and I?
Here is the place to find out. While Heather and Sherry offer political commentary on the issues, I hope to educate on the issues. When you go to the polls in November, vote for the candidate that best represents how you feel. Have a question you’ve always wanted to know but never wanted to ask? Send me a PM and I’ll answer it.
Let’s be educated about our candidates and the issues.
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Valorie Delp shares recipes and kitchen tips in the food blog, solves breastfeeding problems, shares parenting tips, and current research in the baby blog, and insight, resources and ideas as a regular guest blogger in the homeschooling blog. To read more articles by Valorie Delp, click here.