Facts: Campaign Collateral Damage

And, according to a recent Zogby poll, they are throwing their support behind Barack Obama. And Scott MacLeod, chief of TIME's Cairo Bureau, reports that in a two-way race, Obama beats McCain 54% to 33% among Arab-Americans. In a tight nationwide race, their votes could give Obama a boost in a number of key swing states.

There are an estimated 3.5 million Arab-Americans, making up about 1% of the population of the U.S. Almost two-thirds trace their ancestry to countries of the eastern Mediterranean Sea; Lebanon, Palestine, Syria and Jordan. Roughly 70% are Christians and 20% Muslims; the poll respondents were identified as 63% Christian, 24% Muslim and 13% other/none.

Zogby's findings have little to do with the so-called "ethnic vote." His polling found that Arab and Muslim-Americans are voting the same pocketbook issues as the rest of us. 

They're not voting in a bloc because of Middle East-related issues. Arab-Americans considered jobs and the economy by far to be the most important issue in the election rather than Middle East foreign policy issues. Just 16% of Arab-Americans said they favored McCain because of his stance on foreign policy, and only 3% said that about Obama.

Sixty-three percent listed the economy as one of the top two issues facing the country - and that was before the current financial meltdown. Only 37% listed Iraq and Middle East peace. Health care, gas prices and terrorism were all much higher among the issues than regional problems like Palestine and Lebanon. Only 1% of the respondents said either of the latter issues was among the top two issues in the election.

When it came to who was better prepared to handle our economic challenges, 52% picked Obama and 34% chose McCain. Likewise, 48% said Obama was better able to handle the Middle East, while 39% said McCain was.

Zogby found that during the Bush presidency Arab-Americans have swung more decisively behind the Democratic Party in general. The respondents overall gave Bush a 76% negative job approval rating, with even those identifying themselves as Republicans registering only a 63%-37% positive-negative rating for the incumbent president.

Compared to the year Bush was elected in 2000, when the Democratic-Republican ID breakdown was almost even at 40%-38%, Arab-Americans now identify with the Democratic Party by a margin of more than 2-1. Forty-six percent called themselves Democrats, while only 20% said they were Republicans.

Do any of these statistics provide any rationale for the candidates to ignore or diss these voters - much less to encourage voters to go on believing that "that one" is part of the same group?

Yes. The excuse is that we seem to have accepted the proposition that during political campaigns, there are two parallel universes. There's the real world - in which we trumpet our impeccable morality and those wonderful family values, runaway hypocrisy notwithstanding. Then there's the political universe, where a lie is valued only in direct relationship to how big it is.

Call me naïve. Maybe so. But there were many of us who yearned for a different kind of campaign this time. We got rolled bigtime.

Who's to blame? The candidates? The campaign consultants? The political parties?

I don't think so. Candidates and consultants will always do and say whatever they think they have to do to win and/or whatever they think they can get away with. They're just facilitators.

No, I suggest that the problem is a lot closer than that: It's us.

Notwithstanding the endless bromides about the "innate common sense" of the American voter, every credible survey reveals that we are a dangerously uninformed electorate. When a sizable majority of high school grads can't tell you what the first ten amendments to our Constitution are called, do you think our country might just be in trouble?

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