Linkmeister

Is the voter dumb?

Here's an interesting interview with Phillip Gourevitch, who wrote the Rwanda book I wrote about a while back. He also recently wrote a profile of John Kerry for the New Yorker. He's talking about the campaign and the press, and he says this:

Then there's always this kind of presumption of the incredible stupidity of American voter, which I don't think is fair by the way -- it's a fault of the press. There's always this sort of notion that people aren't paying attention, they won't pay attention. Of course people won't pay attention if you give them stupid reporting. It seems to be a very strange equation: people aren't interested in foreign policy, therefore we will talk about it in extremely simplistic, boiled-down ways that make it absolutely useless to pay attention. And then people say, "see, they don't want to hear about it." There's an assumption about where America's attention is. When you go out on the campaign trail, whether they're highly informed or modestly informed, people are really, really engaged and wanting to talk about foreign policy this time. Foreign policy, war making, how to respond to the age of terror as it's called, all these things are rather front and center on the minds of not just guys at the Council on Foreign Relations, but the guys in swing states and in blue collar jobs. That's interesting.

Now if only he could persuade the nabobs at the networks and on our local tv stations that politics deserves more time on air.