RUSH: There’s a piece that’s interesting here, I had it in yesterday’s Stack and didn’t get to it but I held it over. Daniel Foster. Let me just read excerpts of this to you. “Yesterday afternoon on the seventh floor of a nondescript glass office tower on the fringes of downtown Tampa –” this would have been Sunday afternoon “– I sat in a dark room behind a two-way mirror and watched the one-and-only Frank Luntz put a focus group of 23 ‘swing voters’ through the paces.
“What I learned: Americans are worried. About a lot of things. It was a two-and-a-half-hour session, but IÂ’ll give you a for instance. Americans are really worried about education: about cost and competition from abroad, about kids who mortgage their futures by forgoing college to work, about kids who are too lazy to work and hide away in college. They think we need better teachers. They think we need better parents (‘There should be parenting courses!’).
“They think we need to hold educators more accountable. They think we need to leave educators be. They think critical- and creative-thinking skills are the most important. They think we should stick to the three Rs. We should learn from Asia. We should reject the Asian model. There was agreement, at least, that we should do more of the things that work and less of the things that donÂ’t. That, above all, things should be better, and everyone needs to do everything to make them so. And the children, always the children.”
The children are the number-one concern.
“And so it went. Luntz covered all the big issues, from the economy (some are afraid itÂ’s getting worse, but theyÂ’ve got hope; others are optimistic about growth, but they have their doubts) to increased political polarization (the problem, you see, is that Republicans pick conservatives in their primaries, and Democrats pick liberals in theirs).” And that’s the problem. This is all what the swing voters were saying.
Now, as you listen to this, keep in mind that’s who everybody’s gunning for, is these people. Let me just cut to the chase. Daniel Foster at National Review finished watching this and said: My God, these people are schizos! They’re all over the place. They don’t know what they think. They don’t know why they think what they think. You can’t pin ’em down on what they think. They think both sides of everything. They want everybody to think that they’re fair.
They want everybody to think that they’re not this and not that, and that they’re wonderful people. “The sum total revealed a bizarre truth about swing voters. ItÂ’s not that theyÂ’re divided on any given issue, with half taking one side and half the other. Rather, everybody seemed to agree with everybody else about everything — and to disagree with them, too. Transitory coalitions formed and dissolved in what seemed a matter of milliseconds, like exotic particles in a supercollider.
“Everybody blames both parties for gridlock, but everyone also wants politicians brave enough to stand for their principles and against business as usual. Most call themselves moderates. One — one — describes himself as a liberal, and he voted for McCain and plans to vote for Romney. There were even those among them, reader, who liked Bill Clinton and Ronald Reagan equally. Such people arenÂ’t so much swing voters as they are schizophrenic. … The bad news is that these people are going to determine the election.
“The good news? The good news is that they are for Mitt.” That’s what came out of all of this. Moderate swing voters, why are they moderate? You know what? I have a theory about this. As you listen to me read to you Daniel Foster’s description of the swing voter in a Frank Luntz focus group, I don’t think they’re schizophrenic. Well, they may be schizophrenic. I think they’ve been driven to it. I think these people, these poor people — these are your neighbors, our neighbors — have been driven to near-insanity.
Because they instinctively know what’s right, and yet they see on the media every day that they’re wrong. They know what’s right, and they’re made fun of. I think they instinctively know what’s right and wrong, good and sensible, but they’re told every day by the media and the pop culture that they’re not right, that they’re wrong. So it makes ’em nuts. They have been made schizophrenic. They’re nuts out there.
They succumb to the daily barrage that they’re subjected to that they’re kooks, freaks, and oddballs. And they don’t want people to think that. So when they’re put together in a focus group, they make sure that whoever’s running that focus group knows that they’re for this and against it. For it and against it! They see both sides. In other words, “I can see how you feel. I don’t necessarily feel that way now, but I did yesterday.” Anything to avoid criticism. They’re truly schizophrenic, and they’re nuts. And that’s how we get moderates!
It’s how we get people afraid to stand for things because they’re routinely beaten up. Look at the what happens to conservatives in the media who stand up for it. I don’t care who you are, you get destroyed. You get creamed if you go public with it. Well, these people don’t want that. Anyway, as it turns out, they are for Mitt Romney. This group of 23 that Luntz put together (supposedly a representative, nationwide sample) is for Mitt Romney.
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