Yep, me too.  Everyone else was linking to it today, so count me in.  How Obama Got Elected.

Michelle Malkin states that it’s “stupid people voting,” but that misses the point.  These are people who are almost all high school graduates and half of them are college graduates and many of them read the New York Times, watch the network news, watch CNN, MSNBC, PBS, listen to NPR… and despite this they still did not know some very important facts about Barack Obama and Joe Biden, and they ALL knew the stupidest things about Palin and McCain. 

Why should they be expected to know that Joe Biden was a plagiarist?  Has it been mentioned at all this year on any mainstream news show?  I certainly knew that because I lived through the 1980s, when the fact was such common knowledge that it was joked about on “Growing Pains”!  I still remember it.  One of the Seaver kids cheated at school and the principal noted that the only other kid who copied homework was “little Joey Biden”.  Joe Biden being a plagiarist was a fact known by enough of the audience that it could get an easy laugh.  Now, nobody seems to know it.

But what to make of Barack Obama’s voters?  I can understand Joe Average not knowing some of this stuff, but not even 1% of that sample group could get all 12 of them right… and it’s hardly bragging to note that I could have aced these questions with ease.  You can criticize that sampling.  Maybe a “more fair” sample (assuming this sample was bad just for the sake of argument) could have done better.  But does anyone think this polling sample by Zogby could be so far off that Obama’s voters should be getting most of these right?  And does anyone think that if Zogby did the same to McCain’s voters it would be anything close to only .5% of them being able to get all of them right?

I do think that asking the Palin/Fey question is wrong; there should at least be a possible way for the person to answer it right.  If given a multiple choice test, you can’t have the correct answer be “the respondent must object and state that it is ‘none of the above because it was actually a person not on the list’”.