NEW YORK — By a wide margin, Americans consider Rush Limbaugh the nation’s most influential conservative voice. Those are the results of a poll conducted by ’60 Minutes’ and Vanity Fair magazine and issued Sunday. The radio host was picked by 26 percent of those who responded, followed by Fox News Channel’s Glenn Beck at 11 percent. Actual politicians – former Vice President Dick Cheney and former vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin – were the choice of 10 percent each. Asked to choose from among seven presidents, Americans tapped John F. Kennedy as the one they’d like to see added to Mount Rushmore. Kennedy polled 29 percent, with Ronald Reagan second at 20 percent. With all the talk on the news about whether Americans should have the choice of a government-run health insurance plan in any health care reform, only 26 percent of those who responded said they felt confident explaining the ‘public option’ to someone who didn’t know about it. Half of Americans chose laying a wreath at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier as a ceremony in which they’d most like to participate. That swamped the other choices: lighting the Olympic torch, tossing the […]
Monday, November 30th, 2009
Poll: Limbaugh Is Most Influential Conservative
Author:
Source: CBS News/The Associated Press
Publication Date: Nov. 30, 2009
Link: Poll: Limbaugh Is Most Influential Conservative
Source: CBS News/The Associated Press
Publication Date: Nov. 30, 2009
Link: Poll: Limbaugh Is Most Influential Conservative
Stephan: I have been fascinated to watch the Republican Party be taken over by men and women whose only qualification is a certain coarse charisma, a demagoguery of the shallow, and the ideological. Sarah Palin, Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh, are so clownish it is hard to take them seriously, but they are as serious as death, and one must take them very seriously, precisely because polls such as this one show how influential they are.
This is what has come of the breakdown of our educational system such that most Americans today, particularly those 40 or under, have little or no sense of the country's history, and many can not even name the three branches of government, or give the most palsied description as to how they operate. I mourn this trend and what it has wrought because, for a democracy to work, it requires open hard fought debate well-grounded in facts, leaders of substance, and an electorate informed and aware. But here is the truth we live with.
