Notes on Politics: Are You a Knowledgeable Citizen?

As we have watched horrific and violent news play out across the globe – armed conflicts in Iraq, Afghanistan and now in Libya where U.S. soldiers are risking their lives – as well as observe the multi-pronged disaster unfolding in Japan (earthquake, tsunami, potential meltdown of damaged nuclear plants), government officials have been called upon to make a number of important decisions. Here in the United States, our officials must decide whether we should continue to put our troops in harm’s way to hold Gadhafi’s army at bay (or send a barrage of missiles in his general direction). They need to determine when to completely remove our troops from Iraq – meaning everyone outta there – and what to do in Afghanistan, where soldiers have been engaged for going on a decade. Never mind the whole national debt issue . . .

And we, the citizens, are the ones who put those officials there. We do so by listing to presidential, congressional and senate candidates’ promises, examine their backgrounds, policy stands and decide whose judgment we’d prefer to rely upon in moments of crisis like we're facing now.

But what if the people who are doing the voting have no idea what the heck is going on in the world? Only 61.6 percent of eligible voters voted in the 2008 presidential election, but are they among the people who know at least a little something about current events? Newsweek/The Daily Beast has come out with some statistics that really make me shudder and wonder about our citizens' grasp of American history and the workings of our government.

Newsweek got 1,000 U.S. citizens to take the U.S. citizenship test. The results sure are dispiriting:

“[Twenty-nine] percent couldn’t name the vice president. Seventy-three percent couldn’t correctly say why we fought the Cold War. Forty-four percent were unable to define the Bill of Rights. And 6 percent couldn’t even circle Independence Day on a calendar.”



Among the citizenship test’s other questions: What was the Constitutional Convention? Who was the president during World War I? With which countries did we fight during World War II? How many House seats are in Congress? What did Susan B. Anthony do?

Good grief. I’d be willing to wager that the 29 percent of the people who didn’t know that Joe Biden is our vice president are more likely to know who Lady Gaga and Justin Bieber are, and probably spend oodles of time on Facebook.

Wait. It gets worse.

“In March 2009, the European Journal of Communication asked citizens of Britain, Denmark, Finland, and the U.S. to answer questions on international affairs,” Newsweek reported. “The Europeans clobbered us. Sixty-eight percent of Danes, 75 percent of Brits, and 76 percent of Finns could, for example, identify the Taliban, but only 58 percent of Americans managed to do the same—even though we’ve led the charge in Afghanistan. It was only the latest in a series of polls that have shown us lagging behind our First World peers.”



What’s the answer? Mandatory civics classes in schools? Maybe trying to persuade people to turn off mindless reality show programming and save some brain cells for the news rather than The Situation and Snookie? If we started expecting, as a rite of passage, that entering adulthood means that people are expected to be engaged citizens, not people who exist only in their own bubble, disconnected and uninformed about the activities of their local, state and federal government officials at all levels, would that make any difference? Perhaps we should make Schoolhouse Rock videos regular viewing for our school children, and gently suggest that their parents watch along them too? Or does Charlie Sheen have to run for vice president for folks to start paying attention?

If you took the test, how do you think you’d do?

Suburban Mom's Political Fix: Notes from Election Day

Voting: I took the kids with me to vote in our small town in the western suburbs of Boston this morning at around 10. (There's no school today.)

We saw no lines as we entered the school gym and were greeted by a sweet Girl Scout. We waited patiently as she explained in a whisper-soft voice, where we needed to go first -- to check in by our street address. With my ballot in hand, the kids jockeyed for a good position in which to get a look at it as we crammed ourselves into the polling booth. They couldn't believe how many people were running for president. They thought it was just John McCain and Barack Obama.

"The Green-Rainbow Party?" my daughter asked incredulously.

"Yep," I said, as I read aloud all the different presidential/vice presidential candidates and their corresponding parties and the children shook their heads.

They were a bit dismayed when I wouldn't let them fill in the bubbles with the black pen provided -- there was no chance I was going to risk them filling in the wrong circle and ruin my opportunity to vote in this election -- but I did let them help me feed the paper ballot into the machine when we were done. The dullness of putting a ballot into a machine made me miss the time I voted in my first election in my hometown where they have actual levers to pull and a curtain that would dramatically open and record my choices when I was done. It's anti-climatic to fill in a bubble with a pen.

MSNBC All Day: I've had MSNBC on TV all day. I'm a sucker for their "Election Center" in Rockefeller Center and am a big crazy fan of the crew from Morning Joe.

Random Observations:

I thought Barack and Michelle Obama took a really long time filling out their ballots in Chicago. They must have a huge number of Illinois ballot questions or many contested races. (Massachusetts had three ballot questions.) Their 10-year-old daughter Malia, in her hoodie, looked thoroughly bored and yawned several times.

The first thing that came to my mind when I saw Sarah and Todd Palin leave the polls in Wasilla? Shamefully, it was that, as I looked at the vice presidential candidate, I wondered if she'd already given all the expensive campaign-funded duds away to charity.

Calling the Winner Early: I was disturbed by a piece I saw in today's New York Times about when the broadcast and cable news networks will project a winner tonight. I'm a big believer -- even in the age of the Internet, Twitter and Facebook -- of officially holding back on projecting a winner in the presidential race when people are still in the process of voting.

If a candidate concedes, then that person is affecting the voter turnout in places where the votes haven't yet been cast and it's not the media's doing.

But if a candidate hasn't yet conceded, the decent, patriotic thing to do is to wait until polls have closed before calling a state's results. If the networks call the entire election before the folks on the west coast have finished voting, that move would essentially tell people who haven't yet voted that their votes are irrelevant.

The viewers can wait. A little while anyway.