Today's Poll Question: Should the U.S. grow or shrink its footprint in the Middle East?

**SPEAKER_1** (0:01)
Get ready to vote on today's daily poll question at smerconish.com.

**SPEAKER_2** (0:05)
But first, Michael explains it for you right here.

**SPEAKER_1** (0:08)
Welcome to The Smerconish Podcast from SiriusXM.

**SPEAKER_2** (0:11)
For Independent Minds.

**Michael Smerconish** (0:14)
Hello, hello. Today is the 19th of August. It is Wednesday. Do you know what the most surprising thing about yesterday's poll vote was?
How few voted? I'm stunned by it. Saturday, Saturday, we had 57,057.
And Saturday, the voting is higher than all the other days of the week because I'm on CNN and I'm delivering a commentary and we're goosing it through the CNN International audience. I asked about Luigi Mangione on Saturday after I delivered a commentary on that subject. I asked whether his grievances with the health care system could mitigate his crime in any way. The vote was 87.32% who said no, but most stunning was that nearly 60,000 people voted. Yesterday was under 20,000.
17,607. I'm paying close attention to the Jason Arday tragedy. I don't know whether others are not. I mean, it's a UK-based story and it does require you to be knowledgeable about the facts of the case, how he was hired at Cambridge, how he became at age 37 their youngest professor. But I'm taken with the story on a variety of levels, not the least of which is that 0.4%, only 0.4% of the faculty at Cambridge is black. They've been around for 800 years, like they can't do better than that. He was a fabulist. There's no doubt about that, George Santos-level fabulist. What relevance should the personal exaggerations or falsehoods have relative to his tenure, his status at Cambridge? That makes for good conversation. And I had a really good guest yesterday in Tyler Austin Harper talking about the Ardé case. He'd written about it. First of all, he's a former professor himself at Bates, and he had written about it for The Atlantic. And the paragraph on which I based the poll question was when he said this. He said, Ardé was fetishized in his ascendancy by white liberals for whom he served as a mirror in which they could see their own goodness. And he was fetishized in his downfall by white conservatives who saw him as a test case for their own obsessions with an academic apparatus that they believe is not meritocratic enough, which is to say not white enough. And I thought, okay, there's the poll question. Is the Jason Ardé tragedy a story of affirmative action in the extreme?
A racist witch hunt? Both or neither? The lead category, 37.19%, said neither, followed by both 34.17%. I was in that category.
18.44% said it's affirmative action in the extreme, and only 10.21% said it was a racist witch hunt. So, you know, I don't know. I mean, this horrific, the Clancy case that's playing itself out, I've not made the subject of a poll question because it's just so gut wrenching. Maybe I'll change my ways on that. But I'm left wondering why we had great call interest and robust callers about it. But few votes, few votes on that. I suspect it will be different today because today it's smerconish.com. I'm asking in line with a Washington Post story that is really of interest on what are we going to do in the Middle East beyond Iran? And it's a kind of an evergreen in the world of talk radio. Should we be growing or shrinking our footprint in the Middle East? Should we be growing or shrinking our footprint in the Middle East? That's the poll question today and already there's a lot of voting action on it.

**SPEAKER_1** (4:12)
This is the Smerconish Podcast from SiriusXM.

**Michael Smerconish** (4:15)
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