But Not in the Way You Think Only 43% of Obama voters were able to correctly answer that Democrats controlled both Houses of Congress. In a year where the mood was for "throwing the bums out", it's significant that they didn't know from which party the bums came.Â
Before you accuse us of being right-wing nut jobs for suggesting the 2008 Presidential Election was stolen, hear us out. It was stolen. But not in the usual way. Â This year's election was stolen through media bias. I know it sounds like the typical partisan claim, but the difference is - this year even liberals are buying it. And could there be any doubt?
 The man who won was a friend to a racist pastor and a domestic terrorist, he was a friend to the Jew-hating Louis Farrakhan. He chose for 20 years to sit in a church where the pastor preached "God damn America". An election victory would have been impossible if this candidate had been a Republican. The media would have drummed a Republican candidate out of the race based on any one of those things alone. But this year, those things hardly warranted a mention.  To politically-aware conservatives who are alarmed that the American people could have elected such a radical candidate, take heart... they didn't know what they were doing. Most Americans pay attention to the news as if it were background noise. They pick up on the things they hear often repeated and don't pick up on anything that's not reported on TV night after night.
For instance, most Obama voters knew that Sarah Palin had received $150,000 in clothes during the campaign. They were vague on where it had come from, but news reports made it sound as if she had done something unseemly. While a majority of Obama voters could tell you about Sarah Palin's wardrobe, only a small minority of them could tell you that Obama's running mate, Joe Biden, had to resign from a previous presidential run because of plagiarism. In his 1988 campaign for president, Joe Biden lifted important segments of speeches from British Labor Leader Neil Kinnock and repeated them almost verbatim. When this was discovered he had to drop out of the race. Â This year however, the mainstream media made no mention of this. They certainly didn't harp on it the way they obsessed on Sarah Palin's clothes. So it should be no surprise that most people who supported Obama thought he had chosen a highly-qualified and highly-ethical running mate. They had no idea about his plagiaristic ways that have now slipped 20 years into the past.
 In the article below from Politico.com, Time Magazine's Mark Halperin called the 2008 campaign coverage "the most disgusting failure of people in our business since the Iraq war". He cited two New York Times articles as examples of the biased coverage of the two candidates. Halperin at Politico/USC Conference: 'Extreme Pro-Obama' Press Bias By ALEXANDER BURNS | 11/22/08 3:15 PM EST
http://www.politico.com/news/stories/1108/15885.html
Media bias was more intense in the 2008 election than in any other national campaign in recent history, Time magazine's Mark Halperin said Friday at the Politico/USC conference on the 2008 election. Â "It's the most disgusting failure of people in our business since the Iraq war," Halperin said at a panel of media analysts. "It was extreme bias, extreme pro-Obama coverage." Â Halperin, who maintains Time's political site "The Page," cited two New York Times articles as examples of the divergent coverage of the two candidates.
 "The example that I use, at the end of the campaign, was the two profiles that The New York Times ran of the potential first ladies," Halperin said. "The story about Cindy McCain was vicious. It looked for every negative thing they could find about her and it cast her in an extraordinarily negative light. It didn't talk about her work, for instance, as a mother for her children, and they cherry-picked every negative thing that's ever been written about her."  The story about Michelle Obama, by contrast, was "like a front-page endorsement of what a great person Michelle Obama is," according to Halperin.  The former ABC News political director acknowledged that some of the press coverage was simply reflecting the reality of Obama's presidential campaign.
 "You do have to take into account the fact that this was a remarkable candidacy," Halperin said. "There were a lot of good stories. He was new."
 New York magazine's John Heilemann, one of Halperin's co-panelists, offered another reason for all the positive press coverage Obama received.
 "The biggest bias in the press is towards effectiveness," said Heilemann, who is authoring a book on the 2008 race along with Halperin.
 "We love things that are smart." Because Obama's campaign was generally so well run, he argued, the press tended to applaud even his negative tactics.
 "We'll scold you for being negative," Heilemann said, "but if it seems to be working, the tone of your coverage becomes more positive."
Another of Halperin's fellow participants, Los Angeles Times writer Mark Barabak, disagreed more strongly with the Time writer's comments. Still, Halperin's general point met with little resistance
"I think it's incumbent upon people in our business to make sure that we're being fair," he said. "The daily output was the most disparate of any campaign I've ever covered, by far." |  | What Obama Voters Didn't Know:According to a Zogby poll commissioned after the election, Obama voters knew very little about him. This can be attributed to the fact that the media simply didn't focus on these things. http://www.zogby.com/news/ReadNews.cfm?ID=1642 In a 12-multiple-choice question poll, only 2% of Obama supporters achieved a near-perfect score. 54% were able to only guess at right answers 50% of the time. (Remember, the questions were multiple-choice. The answers were read to each participant, and still only half of them were able to get half of the answers right). But surprisingly large numbers of Obama voters were able to get answers right when it came to negative things about Sarah Palin. For instance: - 94% of Obama voters correctly identified Palin as the candidate with a pregnant teenage daughter
- 86% correctly identified Palin as the candidate associated with a $150,000 wardrobe purchased by her political party
- 81% knew that McCain had been unable to identify the number of houses he owned
- 87% said Palin said she could "see Russia from her house", although it was Saturday Night Live's Tina Fey who said this while doing a portrayal of Palin.
However, look at how many fewer Obama voters were able to correctly identify negative facts about Obama: - Only 17% of Obama voters correctly answered that Obama had won his first election by getting all of his opponents removed from the ballot.
- Only 12% correctly associated Obama with his statement that his energy policies would bankrupt the coal industry.
- Only 44% were able to correctly answer that Obama started his political career at the home of two former members of the Weather Underground terrorist organization.
- Only 28% of Obama voters were able to correctly identify Biden as the candidate who had to quite a previous campaign for President because he was found to have plagiarized a speech.
- And 47% of Obama voters did not know that Biden was the one who predicted Obama would be tested by a generated international crisis during the first six months of his presidency.Â
- Only 43% of Obama voters were able to correctly answer that Democrats controlled both Houses of Congress.
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