Berube: You Palin Mockers Think You're So Smart

[BurtWorm]

Blogger's blogger Michael Berube brilliantly dissects the National Insult My Intelligence Tour 2008, otherwise known as McCain-Palin. (Be sure to read the whole post.):

http://www.michaelberube.com/index.php/weblog/so_you_palin_mockers_think_youre_so_smart/

...

So I understood Palin, from the outset, as basically the latest installment in a generation-long project of bird-flipping from the right. Beginning wia generation-long project of bird-flipping from the right. th Reagan, the GOP has come to understand that when it runs with amiable dunces—even putatively amiable dunces—at the top of the ticket (Reagan, Bush II), it kicks butt and (as Atrios succinctly puts it) pisses off liberals; when it runs old-school government-and-civics types who understand things like parliamentary procedure and know the names of furren leaders (Bush I, Dole), it doesn’t fare so well (Bush I won but quickly squandered the party’s Reagan Dividend; meanwhile, Quayle kept alive the attack-on-eloquence-and-arugula). The idea, of course, is to run “ordinary people” (even if they hail from families who have been among America’s political and economic elite for generations) against us Volvo-driving liberal elitists. You know that already. McCain/ Palin merely seemed the most outrageous gambit on this culture-war front, the most deliberate and direct assault on the idea that being reasonably informed about shit should be some kind of prerequisite for the presidency.

Because, you know, the campaign didn’t have to say anything at all about Palin’s foreign-policy expertise. They could simply have said, “it’s not her strong suit, sure, but she’s a quick study and brings a lot of populist energy to the ticket.” Or they could have said, “she’s a strong social conservative and deeply knowledgeable about how to organize a Rapture.” But no. Instead, they went on national television and made a series of arguments so stunningly and egregiously stupid that they wouldn’t have passed muster forty years ago in my third-grade class’s debate over the relative merits of Nixon and Humphrey. Seriously: if one of my fellow eight-year-olds had said anything like, “Sarah Palin has foreign policy experience because Alaska is close to Russia,” we would have laughed his (or her!) right out of the room. And if someone had then tried to follow up with “no, really, she has foreign policy experience because she knows more about energy than anyone in America,” he (or she!) would have been sent to the principal’s office. Or to the school nurse.

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I’ve been reading the GOP campaign as being not merely an assault on liberal elites—like I say, that’s old news—but a frontal attack on the very idea of standards of plausibility in argument. To friends and family (and one or two inquiring reporters), I’ve been calling it the National Insult My Intelligence Tour 2008. It’s as if they’re simply trying to see how much amazing shit they can get away with (like this amazing shit!), even though (as many people have noted) this strategy requires them to run against the very constituency McCain had courted for over a decade—the elite Beltway punditocracy, McCain’s base.

And in so doing, they’re laying a fairly obvious trap for actual liberal elitists like me. When I was speaking at the Belmont Humanities Symposium last month, the topic of presidential debates came up—partly because the forum was about debate, check, and partly because Belmont is hosting the second presidential debate. And in response to one student’s question, I said (among other things) that I can’t stand it when liberals go around saying that Obama is going to wipe the floor with McCain in the debates, or that the Biden-Palin debate will turn the lights out on the whole campaign, because too many liberals and progressives continue to think it’s all a matter of being the smartest person in the room. There are plenty of Republican-voting people out there, I said, who are resentful and (guess what) bitter . . . because they truly believe they are being governed by high and mighty muck-a-mucks who sneer at their pastimes and their cherished local traditions, and they don’t see Obama (or Hillary either!) as someone who’ll give them the time of day. If this election gets framed as Ordinary People against Mr. Extra Extra Smart, I thought, the Democrats are going down in flames. Every time a liberal says, “of course our side should win this—we’re so much smarter than they are,” he (or she!) plays right into the right’s cultural-resentment script. And they make themselves sound like nineteen-year-old Objectivists into the bargain.

The financial crisis may have altered these dynamics, insofar as it seems to have alerted millions of Americans to the virtues of having a president who knows what he’s (or she’s) talking about. But three weeks ago at Belmont, I was pretty well convinced that McCain/ Palin were going to spend two months saying the most ludicrous and batshit things just to (a) make right-wing intellectuals and pundits repeat them and defend them, (b) confuse low-information voters, and (c) piss off liberal elites. And that they might very well win, too. At dinner that night, after the debate about debates, I suggested to my Belmont hosts that it was part of a 30-year culture-war experiment: just as George W. Bush made us nostalgic for the wit and wisdom of Ronald Reagan, so too, in her time, would President Palin make us long for the sagacity and statecraft of George W. Bush.

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[alcibiades_mystery]

1. Ah Berube

Up to his old tricks.

After long hiatus.

[BurtWorm]

2. He expresses the outrage so beautifully.

I wish I'd said all of that.

[GeorgeGist]

3. There's no escaping it ...

America's got Stupid nailed.