John Eck said that electronic billboard ads at the Eck Insurance Agency weren’t intended to be insulting. But how would they not be? The ads said “Vote American, vote Pompeo” and “Real Americans vote for Pompeo.” The campaign of GOP 4th Congressional District candidate Mike Pompeo said it had nothing to do with the ads and didn’t even know about them. Even if the ads weren’t intended to imply that Democrat Raj Goyle is somehow not American because he is of Indian-American descent, they were still offensive. The ads fit with a message promoted by former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin and others that people you disagree with politically aren’t patriotic or “real Americans.”
The nonpartisan fact-checking website PolitiFact.com rounded up the seven “key distortions” of the 2010 campaigns. Among the false charges: that Democrats have slashed $500 billion from Medicare, that Republicans want to privatize Social Security, that “Obamacare” is a “government takeover” and provides Viagra for sex offenders, and that the stimulus has created no private sector jobs but funded ant research in Africa.
Columnist Thomas Friedman reported that America ranks “sixth in global innovation-based competitiveness, but 40th in rate of change over the last decade; 11th among industrialized nations in the fraction of 25- to 34-year-olds who have graduated from high school; 16th in college completion rate; 22nd in broadband Internet access; 24th in life expectancy at birth; 27th among developed nations in the proportion of college students receiving degrees in science or engineering; 48th in quality of K-12 math and science education; and 29th in the number of mobile phones per 100 people.” Even though a panel of top scientists and technology experts has made specific recommendations for how to close this competitiveness gap, few politicians are talking about this, and there has been almost no media attention. Friedman lamented: “A dysfunctional political system is one that knows the right answers but can’t even discuss them rationally, let alone act on them, and one that devotes vastly more attention to cable TV preachers than to recommendations by its best scientists and engineers.”
