One noteworthy poll finding is that the public figure who scores highest as a moral exemplar is Colin Powell (not surprisingly, Clinton ranks lowest). The WSJ quotes pollster Fred Yang on the Powell results as follows: "An African-American male rated as having the highest morals among white Southern Conservatives truly belongs on Mount Rushmore."
In terms of the focus-group results, to me the most interesting comment was this: "What really bothers them [the members of the focus group] is the deep-seated materialistic culture of the 1990s -- a culture that worships $100 Nike sneakers, a culture that is pervasive, persistent, which crowds out time with family, and which transcends anything that politicians can address. 'We need to make sacrifices for our children. We need to not take that second job for that Volvo, for the material goal out there,' says Steve Hasson, a 65-year-old retired fire department official. 'The most precious gift that we can give our children is our time, and to be involved, and to make a point of sitting down and having a meal together.'"
To me, this stands as yet more evidence that there is a huge, growing amount of latent hostility toward capitalism in the United States. People are fed up with squandering their lives in the pursuit of cheesy, unneeded commodity goods and "services" such as mindless, sordid mass entertainment.
The question, as always, is: how can this resentment be tapped to advance a *real* leftist agenda and not simply manipulated to serve the self-interest of political degenerates like Clinton?
Carl Remick