{"id":534,"date":"2008-10-12T15:55:01","date_gmt":"2008-10-12T20:55:01","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/?p=534"},"modified":"2008-10-12T16:14:24","modified_gmt":"2008-10-12T21:14:24","slug":"my-2-cents-on-palin-obama-dumb-voters-the-2008-election","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/2008\/10\/12\/my-2-cents-on-palin-obama-dumb-voters-the-2008-election\/","title":{"rendered":"My 2 Cents on Palin, Obama, Dumb Voters, &#038; the 2008 Election"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Robert Zullo of the <em>Houma Courier<\/em> (of Houma, Louisiana, in Terrebonne parish, near New Orleans) interviewed me on Thursday on the 2008 election.   His <a href=\"http:\/\/www.houmatoday.com\/article\/20081012\/ARTICLES\/810129952?Title=Local_voters_weigh_in_on_their_presidential_picks\"><strong>article<\/strong><\/a> in today&#8217;s paper very nicely captures how voters are making decisions as they head towards the voting booth.  <\/p>\n<p>He kindly included a number of quotes from me in his piece, which I reckon I can reprint without trampling federal copyright law.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Local voters weigh in on their presidential picks<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>By Robert Zullo<br \/>\nSenior Staff Writer<br \/>\nPublished: Sunday, October 12, 2008<br \/>\n&#8230;&#8230;<br \/>\n&#8230;.<br \/>\nJames Bovard, a former journalist and Libertarian-minded author of \u201cAttention Deficit Democracy\u201d and other books on the state of American government and the U.S. electorate, said the 2008 campaign has been \u201ca great year for cynics.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Bovard said \u201csound bytes and slurs\u201d exert too much influence on the electorate. \u201cFolks have been satisfied with phrases instead of making the effort to understand the policy,\u201d he added.<\/p>\n<p>Part of the problem, Bovard said, is government has become much bigger, policies have become more complex and, at the same time, the average citizen has made little or any effort to keep up.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cThis basically puts politicians on the honor system,\u201d Bovard said, adding that distortions and falsehoods spread by campaigns are aided by news media that can be \u201ccowardly\u201d or just as ignorant as the voters they seek to inform. \u201cIt\u2019s easier to get away with lies nowadays.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>&#8230;In the last eight years, much of which was dominated by the Republican party control of the executive and legislative branches, the GOP has \u201cexpanded government in so many ways,\u201d Bovard said, pointing to farm subsidies and Republican complicity in the $700 billion Wall Street bailout.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cPeople have gotten vested in politicians and certain political parties and they are blind to the faults and blind to the lies,\u201d Bovard said.<\/p>\n<p>Voters and media also fail to fully investigate campaign issues, such as Barack Obama\u2019s support for increasing ethanol production.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cThis is a good example of an ultimate bogus issue,\u201d he said. \u201cIt\u2019s a very poor source of fuel, but it\u2019s good for the farm lobby.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Bovard also said he was mystified by the popular excitement generated by Obama and Palin in their respective parties.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cSomething I find almost comical is that some of the Obama supporters seem to think the only thing that\u2019s necessary in order to have a government that serves people is a new set of politicians in charge. Both parties are complicit in many of the abuses of the last eight years,\u201d Bovard said.<\/p>\n<p>Given her lack of experience, he was also amused by that \u201cpeople have read so many positive qualities\u201d into Palin, who was the mayor of small Alaskan town just two years ago.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cAll of a sudden she\u2019s a new Joan of Arc,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cFirst and foremost she\u2019s a politician,\u201d Bovard said, adding that to some extent the same phenomenon extends to Obama. \u201cFolks somehow think these two people have somehow transcended the follies that are the bad traits of their class. \u2026 It\u2019s almost as if people are desperate for a savior. I think that explains some of the reaction to Palin and also Obama.\u201d<br \/>\n************<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Robert Zullo of the Houma Courier (of Houma, Louisiana, in Terrebonne parish, near New Orleans) interviewed me on Thursday on the 2008 election. His article in today&#8217;s paper very nicely captures how voters are making decisions as they head towards the voting booth. He kindly included a number of quotes from me in his piece, [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[22,659,6,17],"class_list":{"0":"post-534","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"hentry","6":"tag-attention-deficit-democracy","8":"tag-bovard","9":"tag-elective-dictatorship"},"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v27.4 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/product\/yoast-seo-wordpress\/ -->\n<title>My 2 Cents on Palin, Obama, Dumb Voters, &amp; the 2008 Election - James Bovard<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/2008\/10\/12\/my-2-cents-on-palin-obama-dumb-voters-the-2008-election\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"My 2 Cents on Palin, Obama, Dumb Voters, &amp; the 2008 Election - James Bovard\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Robert Zullo of the Houma Courier (of Houma, Louisiana, in Terrebonne parish, near New Orleans) interviewed me on Thursday on the 2008 election. 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The Wall Street Journal called Bovard \"the roving inspector general of the modern state\" and Washington Post columnist George Will called him a \"one-man truth squad.\" His 1994 book, Lost Rights: The Destruction of American Liberty, received the Free Press Association\u2019s Mencken Award as Book of the Year. His Terrorism &amp; Tyranny won the Lysander Spooner \"Best Book on Liberty in 2003\" award. He received the Thomas Szasz Award for Civil Liberties work, awarded by the Center for Independent Thought and the Freedom Fund Award from the Firearms Civil Rights Defense Fund of the National Rifle Association. Bovard\u2019s writings have been publicly denounced by FBI director Louis Freeh, the Secretary of Agriculture, the Secretary of Housing and Urban Development, the Postmaster General, and the chiefs of the U.S. International Trade Commission, the Drug Enforcement Administration, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, and the Federal Emergency Management Agency, as well as by many congressmen and other malcontents.","sameAs":["http:\/\/www.jimbovard.com","https:\/\/www.facebook.com\/jim.bovard","https:\/\/x.com\/jimbovard"],"url":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/author\/admin\/"}]}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/534","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=534"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/534\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":540,"href":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/534\/revisions\/540"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=534"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=534"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=534"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}