2012 Republican Primary

Republican presidential candidate, former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney, greets people during a campaign stop Monday, Jan. 2, 2012. | AP Photo

There has been so much coverage of the 2012 Republican Primary lately that I have become sick of the coverage, in much the same way I am sick of hearing about Tim Tebow.

It is great to hear reporter’s takes on who they think will win. It is great the media is covering the primaries in such detail. However, the average American is paying no attention to any of this. I am sure they have heard of each candidate in passing at least once. The biggest problem is that the media never makes light of the candidate’s political stances. Unless one really tries to pay attention, they would not know Ron Paul isn’t a “real” republican. He is a libertarian.

During the course of the past few months, I have repeatedly heard about who is “winning” the race.

Let us analyze the latest Iowa Caucus poll conducted by Insider Advantage.

The poll shows the following:

2012 President: Republican Caucus
23% Romney
22% Paul
18% Santorum
16% Gingrich
10% Perry
6% Bachmann
2% Huntsman

These numbers echo just about everything the media has reported. But upon further examination, one would notice the poll only involves 729 people. Since this poll has been reported, it must represent a majority of voters, or at least a large minority. It does not. Iowa’s population contains more than 3 million people. Therefore, 729 is not even one percent of the population.

These incredibly minute numbers are echoed in just about every poll I have seen. Occasionally a poll will ask more than one thousand people, but more than likely not.

Pollsters try to get a wide variety of demographics. With 729 people, can one really accurately predict an election?

Another important consideration is whether those people will even be part of the small minority that make the journey to the polls. Unless this year is an abnormality, the voter turnout will be abysmally low, most likely below 50 percent.

I do not want to be misconstrued as saying polls don’t matter. I am trying to say the media should take polls with a grain of salt because they are an incredibly minute portion of the electorate, who may or may not be informed about a candidate’s policy stances.

Photo credit: The Associated Press

If the U.S. news media actually did their job

We would know about:

Heavy Rains causing massive flooding in China

A bomb detonating in the Turkish capital killing 3

But they don’t, so one of the top stories today is that Mariano Rivera set the all time saves record….. Some real “breaking news”

Forget Haiti, Let’s all start writing about Japan

Before I begin, please don’t take this as me mitigating the events in Japan. Japan is in an awful situation, there is already been thousands dead and there will undoubtedly be thousands more that will die from radiation in the coming months. However, Japan will eventually rebuild and return to prominence much like New Orleans did after Katrina struck in 2005, minus the impending nuclear meltdown and earthquake.

Haiti has been long forgotten and I am sure that the news media would consider any story written about Haiti “stale.” In other words, it is old news. Even Lybia has been long forgotten and it started only a few weeks ago. The fact of the matter is that the news media jumps from issue to issue based on what editors think is important.

The more pressing issue about Haiti is: although they have already started the rebuilding process, please don’t think for one second that they will be “well off” in the near future. Before the earthquake Haiti was on the low end of second world countries. The organizations that are helping out in Haiti have probably started to move much of their resources to Japan, not all of them, but a good portion. this leaves the Haitian government “high and dry.” They will now have to rebuild with mostly internal funding or take out large loans until their debt equals an astronomical number similar to the United States.

The bottom line is that Haiti cannot rebuild itself by itself. The country will not be in a livable condition without foreign aid. 

Japan has all the resources to get back to where it was all by itself. I am not saying that this won’t be a long and drawn out process. It will obviously take years and the repercussions of the nuclear reactor problems will have lasting effects past the date when everything is rebuilt. I am saying, however, that Japan can figure it out by itself with little to no foreign aid.

If there is one thing that you should take away from this, if you have chosen to take on the arduous task of reading it all, is that a world power such as japan should not be the main focus of foreign aid when a country, which is still in dire need, has been thrust off of the world stage and nearly forgotten about.