This is why I generally distain democracy as nothing more then tyrany of the people.
The thing that either they or you missed is the impact of a variety of intersections of politics and psychology. One of the reasons you see so much positive rhetoric about America and the people is the work of the psychologist Martin Seligman who studies things like learned helplessness and Positive Psychology and basically deals with the importance of Optimistic Explanatory Style when dealing with success.
One of his students had the idea of trying to apply this idea to the prediction of elections by using CAVE(content analysis of verbatim explanations). And honestly the results were kinda scary. Basically the research showed that it is a pretty accurate predictor atleast in the 20th century. This is why early on Obama focused so heavily on Hope and what not and why everyone is talking about how wonderful we all are.
Out of the 4 the only one I have seen who seems to have a firm grip intelectually on all the issues and what not is Biden. One of the main reasons why people vote for values over intelectual grip on the issues is because a year from now or 3 years from now there will likely be a different set of issues and someone who holds similar values to you even if you disagree with them on a current issue is theoretically more likely to be on the same side of an issue in the future.
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regna
(no subject)
Date: 2008-10-07 07:20 pm (UTC)The thing that either they or you missed is the impact of a variety of intersections of politics and psychology. One of the reasons you see so much positive rhetoric about America and the people is the work of the psychologist Martin Seligman who studies things like learned helplessness and Positive Psychology and basically deals with the importance of Optimistic Explanatory Style when dealing with success.
One of his students had the idea of trying to apply this idea to the prediction of elections by using CAVE(content analysis of verbatim explanations). And honestly the results were kinda scary. Basically the research showed that it is a pretty accurate predictor atleast in the 20th century. This is why early on Obama focused so heavily on Hope and what not and why everyone is talking about how wonderful we all are.
Out of the 4 the only one I have seen who seems to have a firm grip intelectually on all the issues and what not is Biden. One of the main reasons why people vote for values over intelectual grip on the issues is because a year from now or 3 years from now there will likely be a different set of issues and someone who holds similar values to you even if you disagree with them on a current issue is theoretically more likely to be on the same side of an issue in the future.