The man who released a popular YouTube video that reveals a startling lack of knowledge about the 2008 president campaign by voters who supported Barack Obama says Democrats now are attacking him for his exposure of the situation.
"Essentially, the left-wing blogosphere went all 'Joe the Plumber' on me and John Zogby," said John Ziegler, whose YouTube video has been explosive, with more than 1.6 million views.
The video is embedded here:
The video explains that Obama supporters were interviewed after they voted for the Democrat and asked a number of multiple-choice questions about various campaign issues and statements.
The video, as well as the results of a related poll, are available on Ziegler's "HowObamaGotElected.com" website.
Critics have called it "dubious," "right-wing," "falsehood-based" and "a crock."
In the video, an Obama supporter identified as Adarsha said Republicans are in control of Congress now, and her fellow Democratic Party voters agreed.
They also admitted not knowing of Rep. Barney Frank, most didn't know House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and many didn't know of Harry Reid, the Senate majority leader.
However, they were almost unanimously correct in identifying GOP vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin as the candidate with a pregnant daughter.
And almost unanimously, they agreed Palin also was the one who stated she could see Russia from her house, although this question had a twist. The statement actually came from "Saturday Night Live" Palin-impersonator Tina Fey.
Most said Palin also made the statement, "I've now been in 57 states, I think one left to go," when the source actually was Obama. And they blamed GOP presidential candidate John McCain for Democratic vice-presidential candidate Joe Biden's statement that Obama would be immediately tested with an international crisis.
Read about what an Obama White House will mean for the United States, in "The Audacity of Deceit."
In a commentary on Fox News, Ziegler wondered, "Why Is the Left so Threat[en]ed By My Poll?"
"It has been quite a strange couple of weeks since I decided to commission a Zogby poll of Obama voters. I chose to do this at great personal expense to determine whether interviews I did on Election Day (for a forthcoming documentary I am producing on the media coverage of the election) were indeed representative of the larger population," he said.
"In a nutshell, here's what happened next: I suddenly become a favorite target of the Internet's left-wing attack machine. Zogby was forced to defend the poll and two days later, his organization partially abandoned it. The video of Obama voters trying to answer the same questions that were asked by the Zogby poll has been viewed over 1.6 million times on YouTube. After Zogby balked, I managed to to commission a new poll that included both Obama and McCain voters as well as a couple of added twists."
He said what was most remarkable, however, "about the left's extreme reaction to the original Zogby poll was that it was utterly devoid of even the pretense of addressing the real issues that the nationwide telephone survey exposed. Instead of debating the implications of the results (in my view they clearly revealed a massive amount of media-induced ignorance on the part of the voting public), they chose to focus on the questioners rather than the actual answers from Obama voters — clearly, the responses they gave made them feel remarkably insecure."
He said the controversy was so powerful, he followed up with a new poll, with results that were significantly one-sided.
"In general, McCain voters were significantly more well-informed than their counterparts, and there is overwhelming evidence that the gaps in knowledge are directly related to the media sources they were exposed to," he said.
He cited the highlights of the new results from Wilson Research Strategies:
- 35 percent of McCain voters got 10 or more of 13 multiple choice questions correct.
- 18 percent of Obama voters got 10 or more of 13 questions correct.
- McCain voters knew which party controls congress by a 63-27 margin.
Obama voters got the "congressional control" question wrong by 43-41. - Those that got "congressional control" correct voted 56-43 for McCain.
- Those that got "congressional control" wrong voted 65-35 for Obama.
- Those that could associate Bill Ayers' name/story with Obama voted 52-48 for McCain.
- Those that knew Obama had made negative comments about "coal power plants" voted 76-24 for McCain.
- Those that knew Obama had his opponents knocked off the ballot in his first campaign voted 66-34 for McCain.
Ziegler, who also wrote and produced "Blocking the Path to 9/11," said his initial interviews on the video of Obama voters left him with "a pretty low opinion of what most of them had picked up from the media coverage of the campaign, but this poll really proves beyond any doubt the stunning level of malpractice on the part of the media in not educating the Obama portion of the voting populace."
The Zogby polling company said it stood by its results.
"We reject the notion that this was a push poll because it very simply wasn't. It was a legitimate effort to test the knowledge of voters who cast ballots for Barack Obama in the Nov. 4 election. Push polls are a malicious effort to sway public opinion one way or the other, while message and knowledge testing is quite another effort of public opinion research that is legitimate inquiry and has value in the public square."
Among the attackers was Nate Silver at the fivethirtyeight.com website.
The polling, Silver wrote, is "part of what can best be described as a viral marketing effort to discredit the intelligence of Obama supporters."
"Why Zogby International has decided to accept this client and conduct a survey in this fashion is not clear. I would hope, however, that any and all clients that need legitimate polling work conducted would take their business elsewhere," he wrote.
Ziegler said the results simply prove his hypothesis: that the media did not fully inform voters of the Democratic candidate's positions and views.
"While I guess I should not have expected much from the followers of a false Messiah virtually installed by an adoring media, even I have been a bit taken aback by the absurdity and intensity of much of the reaction to the video and the Zogby poll that I commissioned," he wrote..
"Many left-wing blogs (and many of the thousands of e-mails I have received from their readers) are absolutely obsessed with trying to prove that the wording of certain questions was not 100 percent accurate, as if that would have made any difference at all except in the case of the question about Russia which was asked for a the specific purpose of measuring the 'Tina Fey effect,'" he said.
"To me this shows how nuts the left is over this whole thing. If they weren't drinking the Kool Aid and desperate to come up with some way of explaining the unexplainable they would realize that the point of the question was to determine whether or not the person heard enough media coverage about a subject to know the answer," he said.
On the Fox News website, participants in a forum exchanged arguments:
- The reason the left is so upset is because the poll reflects the truth. After the establishment left media's attack on Christians and conservatives as uneducated hayseeds, we on the right have known all along that it is the liberals who are simple-minded and uneducated.
- The real story is the angry left’s response to valid questions.
- It's time for the old guard to retire and bring in fresh new thinkers. Our nation will be better for it.
- We won. You lost.
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