Wednesday, November 5, 2008

And Here We Go...

Although I hate politics, the recent election is an inevitable topic. I would be remiss not to say something, so I'll offer up a token post.

First off, I'd like to respectfully congratulate the President-elect Barack Obama. While I may disagree with a great deal of his positions, I believe that he will do what he believes is right. He will be leading our country for the next four years and I will give him my respect as I will give any of our presidents. I pray that God gives him the wisdom and guidance to lead in such a chaotic time.

That having been said, I was reading a few post-election articles when I came upon this quote (found here) which just begged to be addressed:

"This is the first election of the future. In many ways, we are moving toward a post-racial America," per ABC's George Stephanopoulos. "Look at how race really wasn't an issue in this campaign. 

Eighty percent of voters said they didn't take it into account anyway, and only 19 percent of the voters said they did. And Obama won both groups."

The mathematician (particularly the statistics side) cried out in pain. First, there's no source that I could find showing where they got these numbers, which means that for all we know they conjured them out of thin air. However, I'll give them the benefit of the doubt and say that they actually took some sort of poll.

Still, these numbers are complete questionable. First off, about 1 in every 5 people taking race into account when voting is nothing to brag about. That's a ton of people taking something into account that should matter about as much as a person's eye color. Still, it seems to me like the numbers are probably really off. As if there's any guarantee that the people are answering honestly. I can just imagine the situation:

Reporter: Excuse me you just voted correct?

American Citizen: Uh...yeah.

Reporter (holding pad of paper eagerly): Did you consider the fact that Obama is black when you voted?

American Citizen: Er...uh....

Just the fact that 19% of people were bold enough to say yes probably speaks volumes to how big of a part race played in this election. While I'm sure people could argue back and forth for days over whether or not that's a good thing, to suggest (as the reporter above did) that race didn't really play a part is patently silly.

That's all for now, hopefully I'll find something much cooler to talk about next time.

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

You have already heard my thoughts on the topic. My question is... if 80 percent said one thing and 19 percent said another thing.. what happened to the other 1 percent? Did they just stare blankly at the reporter? lol

Phillip said...

Probably.

Although realistically, they are allowing for some sort of error I'd imagine. Or it could be a truncating error where it was really 19.47% and 80.53% and they just cut off the decimals.

Who knows.

Kayla said...

I can't wait for your "cooler" topic...what are your standards of cool?

sorry I don't like to talk about politics or I would comment on that part of the post...haha

Anonymous said...

Haha. Don't worry Kayla. Phillip doesn't like talking about politics for too long :)

Phillip said...

My standards of cool are "what's cool is and what isn't, isn't."

Of course that's EVERYONE's standard.

I'll be aiming for a tech related post. (Something about upcoming technology, but not too technical)