These Slate guys have been listening to me, because they seek to explain how Kerry went from zero to the presumptive nominee in weeks. This study put a subject in a room with a bunch of other people, and asked everybody to say which of two sets of lines were longer. Everybody except the subject was in on the experiment, and would say the shorter set of lines was the longer set. In one third of the cases, the subject would go along with the crowd rather than believe his own eyes! This is said to happen in stock market crashes and cultural fads like belly piercing. That, my friends, is a moderate.
I had never heard of this test before last night, but I could have conducted it at the Limbaugh Institute. This study applies to the Kerry ‘stampede,’ finally giving me an explanation for what I have not understood ever since Dean bit the dust. The left is nothing but a bunch of copycat me-toos who want to be on the winning side and go with the crowd. Hello, moderates! – which means ‘Hello, liberals!’ since moderates are just liberals without the courage to identify themselves as such. That’s unlike conservatives, who all have the guts to say who they are and what they believe.
Quote: ‘Not surprisingly many people, pundits especially, are reluctant to concede this point…. Kerry supporters might talk about his ‘electability,’ but they believe the support for him has some other basis, such as foreign policy experience, other than just following the crowd.’ This is ‘a distortion of perception in which they perceive the majority as being correct.’ Hubba hubba! So if Dean had won those first two primaries, these voters might well have cascaded to him – and everyone would be saying, ‘It’s obvious Kerry lost. He had the charisma of a dead horse.’ Imagine! A huge chunk of you people voting for Kerry outside of New Hampshire and Iowa are just tagging along.
