How do you guys reason with the fact that educated voters overwhelmingly favor Obama over McCain and Clinton? Maybe they know something more than you guys.
Speaking as someone who has spent eight years in academia surrounded by supposedly “highly educated” people (and who has a couple of degrees myself and is working on a third), I will say straight up that “educated” people are not automatically better judges of political reality than anyone else. In fact, many times they are worse, particularly if they have been educated in a “soft” field like English, because a.) they aren’t accustomed to dealing with reality, only with symbols which they can manipulate as they please, and b.) because “soft field” intellectual enclaves in particular tend to fall prey to groupthink and other coercive social pressures to conform to the group line. The textbook example, of course, is the Duke lacrosse case, in which a great many of the Duke faculty (particularly in “soft” fields like cultural anthropology) unthinkingly supported the accuser and continued to do so even as her accusations began to unravel. The same effect could absolutely have happened at my university or at many other college campuses across the country.
In the coming election, I will be voting for whoever is willing to be responsible on Iraq. If that’s Howard the Duck, then I will be voting for Howard the Duck. Obama’s position on Iraq is incoherent, therefore I will not be voting for him. *shrug*
