Mysterious words from someone in the Washington Post. And apropos of the woman voter, she writes:
Penn was right about the importance of the women’s vote. About 57
percent of the voters in the Democratic primaries so far have been
women. As of Feb. 12, Clinton had a lead of about seven percentage
points over Obama among them (24 points among white women). But the
Obama campaign reached out to the fair sex, following Clinton’s
announcement of women-oriented programs with similar ones within a
matter of weeks. I can imagine the strategists for the senator from Illinois thinking, "What’s that song in Verdi‘s ‘Rigoletto’?" Women are fickle.
Turns out it’s true.
Why’s that, you wonder?
From the moment the primary season began, the group "women" divided
along racial lines. Black women have backed Obama by more than 78
percent. But even after subtracting that group, white women (including
Hispanics) are still the single largest demographic in the party, at 44
percent. If they voted as a bloc, it would take only a little help from
any other bloc to elect the female candidate. White women favor
Clinton. So why is she trailing as the contest heads to Ohio and Texas?
I know this is supposed to be funny–what with the hilarious reference from Rigoletto–but aside from being representative of Cokie Roberts style Monday morning identity politics breakdown, it’s just silly. Women would only be fickle if, as an identical group, they changed their minds–qual pium al vento. The quick references to the polls hardly establish that.
The more likely conclusion is that the author of this silly thoughts is muta d’accento e di pensiero.
Congratulation on your new layout. It looks great.
Didn’t you get the memo? Modern opinion polls now have a built-in feature which allows lazy journalists to read the minds of the respondents. Polls have also solved the decades-old problem of providing wildly different responses based on changes as prosaic as question order, word choice, gender of the questioner, time of day during which it is conducted, and so on.
All of those problems have been solved. Coupled with the new mind-reading feature, polling can now tell us everything about everyone – that is, as long as one is a Sophisticated Media Person who can correctly interpret the oracle.