Spiritually, could you really know anything authentic of Obama only from Republican and Democratic political ads that contained...?

...no footage or trace of him but only rhetoric about him?

Would isolated quotes ripped out of context like this help you? --

“If you’ve got a business — you didn’t build that. Somebody else made that happen.” -- Obama

Pretty easy to spin an isolated sentence even to make it seem to mean something very different then it actually seemed in the full speech.

So, why do we so readily imagine, why fantasize we'd know what it means without the full speech or many of the paragraphs or full topic section surrounding it?

Is it because we are deeply tribal, and it's only about following/obey/bowing to our tribe ideology? We want to align our knowing to what our tribe commands us to know?