Update on a post not up to my usual, brutally honest standards

3 comments made yesterday were caught by my spam filter and, despite my attempt to de-spam them, have disappeared into spamland with 13 other messages about auto insurance. One was a well written critique of my recent post about CNN and the Founding Fathers, and 2 were very nice messages about the blog in general. The critique took me to task a bit for laying off during the post, saying basically that I wasn’t up to my usual standards of brutal honesty. In a nutshell, the reader caught onto the fact that I was ducking any religious or political stance and sort of wondered how that could be, given the subject. The reader did afford me one saving grace, namely my call for education reform as the answer to what ails us.

I hear you, and I agree. The post was lazy. For anyone who wonders where I stand on the political and religious issues of the day, please allow me to refer you to this post and this one from a year ago… near as I can tell, not much has changed.

And as for my true feelings about CNN’s poll, frankly, I don’t think it matters. We are a nation of issue voters, and trying to anticipate the outcome of an election based on how American’s feel about some larger trend misses the point. At the ballot box, we tend to vote according to our feelings on one or more of the following:

1. Who will keep the cost of living down (for many this means wages; for some this means pro-business policies; for everyone this means lower taxes)
2. Who will nominate Supreme Court Justices we like
3. Who makes the more credible promise that our children might stay safe (this is where education loses: in the short run, police and prisons seem to provide more security, even though education provides the greatest long-term security for everyone)
4. Who looks and sounds more Presidential

Only if our primary issue is stacking the Supreme Court do issues like religion matter; everywhere else, such issues are a smoke screen… i.e., religious groups will want more political power if it means more government contracts, but then they’ll want less when they start receiving the scrutiny and audits that come with those contracts. And honestly, I don’t think most American’s are sharp enough to understand the importance of America’s independent judiciary; I think most people see the courts as one more thing that politicians bicker about that doesn’t impact them in any meaningful way. (Sorry folks, I may be an optimist, but I’m also a realist.)

The nice comments, by the way, alerted me to the fact that a few more people are now picking up my RSS feed, which is fantastic. Welcome aboard!

I have no way of recalling those comments… but now you know what got said, albeit in digest form. If anyone can suggest an alternative to ASKIMET I’m all ears, and if you wrote the posts I’m talking about and still have a copy, fire it over and I’ll get it up to the site.

Jason Seiden is Co-founder and CEO of Ajax Social Media, a training company that shows professionals how use social media to work more effectively.