The latest in managed ignorance: Voters think TARP passed under Obama, not Bush. So many corrections, so little time…
Jason Kuznicki
Jason Kuznicki is a research fellow at the Cato Institute and contributor of Cato Unbound. He's on twitter as JasonKuznicki. His interests include political theory and history.
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Perhaps, but I couldn’t help but notice this sentence: “Notably, there is no partisan divide on the question.” That suggests to me that this is more of a case of people naturally misfiling election year events with the guy they kept seeing on TV at the time.
I had a friend who, after Katrina, was pointing out how Clinton hadn’t done any better with Hurricane Andrew. When I pointed out that, since Andrew happened in 1992, the elder Bush was actually president at the time, he didn’t believe me until we looked it up on wikipedia. The craziest part: He was living in Florida during Hurricane Andrew (although not a section that got hit).Report
Not only that, John McCain stopped campaigning in order to run back to Washington for this very important vote.
Did he vote against it?
Nope.
He stopped campaigning so he could vote *FOR* it.
Republicans are the only hope for something something and, anyway, seriously, if we didn’t pass TARP the financial markets would have collapsed.Report
Is this a case of managed ignorance or just ignorance? The charge that conservative engage in more of it seems to rest on the diea that they live in an isular world, being spoon-fed misinformation from Karl Rove and and Bill O’Reilly. Doesn’t the fact that there is no partisan divide on this issue blow that thesis out of the water?Report
@Sam M,
I’ve given it some thought, and you may be right about this one.
Still, I’m not entirely ready to abandon it. Democrats may simply be confused, perhaps by the very same media that are driving the ignorance on the other side of the aisle. But the confusion among Democrats is extraneous to the process, and not likely one being fomented by their side’s party leaders and opinion makers — the “managers” that the idea implies. I may be wrong here, but I can’t imagine Obama wanting to take credit for the politically unpopular TARP.
Still, a greater disparity among the two sides would definitely help the case. It exists on other issues, but apparently not here.Report
@Jason Kuznicki,
But why must there be any intentional “fermentation” at all? It can be explained by other means with ease (the Democrats have tried their hardest to brand the Republicans as being the “Party of No” on economic issues) so why jump strait to managed ignorance? It says more about your own prepossessions than it does reality.Report
@T. Greer,
Sure, if this were the only example. It hardly is.Report
I think it’s very telling that both parties have interfered so much, no one can keep up with which party did what. Does it really matter. I think the pertinent fact is that government in general is out of control. The Repubs and Dems are going to go on fighting long after the public quits giving a damn who’s at fault for an particular policy, since hey both became statist to the teeth. It’s a type of magical realism that the political class thinks it’s the public that’s out of touch.Report
@Mike Farmer, Mike, you’re absolutely right. For all practical purposes there’s no difference between the Neocon/RINO GOP and the Commie-Dems. Both are statist, interventionist, and Globalist (though for slightly different reasons).Report