I am so tired of the idiotic arguments Republicans like Kathleen Parker make about how you don’t need no book-learning to be a decent president. First, forget the qualities you need to actually get the job. They’re only relevant for one thing: having a decent chance of convincing the public that you’re on their side and have the right policies. But being able to sell yourself and your policies is less important than knowing what you’re doing.
People should think of the president like they think of an astronaut. Or, since we all go along for the ride, maybe picture an airline pilot. Do you care if your pilot is a regular guy? Are you going to hold it against him if he was the best pilot the Air Force Academy ever trained? Conversely, are you going to be comfortable if he barely qualified for his license?
I am not making a political argument. A lot of people don’t like and cannot truly trust people who are a lot smarter than them. It’s understandable. No one wants to get swindled or seduced by clever talk. But if you want a president to make good decisions, you better hope they know all about the world, its conflict points, the history of all the other powers, how the economy works, what happens when international systems break down, who we can trust, and who is trying to screw us. You want to know why Poppy Bush didn’t ruin the country? Being head of the CIA and ambassador to China, and vice-president gave him a lot of experience to make informed decisions. He made some mistakes, but he navigated us through the fall of the Soviet Union without incident. Maybe he had to fake liking pork rinds to appeal to the conservative base. Maybe he had a hard time connecting with people. But he knew what he was doing, unlike his son, and unlike Rick Perry or Michele Bachmann.
Whether a president appeals to the average voter or not, it’s incredibly important that they know what they’re doing. Our current president knows what he’s doing. So did Bill Clinton, when he wasn’t letting his penis do his thinking. Being smart and well-educated does not guarantee success, but being of average intelligence and ignorant is a recipe for disaster. We need someone a little more sophisticated than ‘Iran bad’, ‘Saudi Arabia good.’ Do you know if Hizbollah is Sunni or Shi’a? No? Then you’d be a total disaster as president. You’d be completely at the mercy of your advisers. Why? Because you don’t know anything about the world, that’s why. You’re liable to invade the wrong country without a reconstruction plan.
I know even Parker is disturbed by the “I’m stupid, vote for me” attitude of Bush and Perry, but it’s lot worse than she acknowledges. Why are we even debating climate change, evolution, and the HPV vaccine? Because they GOP is addicted to The Stupid, that’s why. And it’s incredibly dangerous.
Unfortunately, anti-intellectualism has a long history in the US. Generally, as a society, we tend to wear ignorance with pride and to punish those who make a genuine effort to think reflectively and critically. That’s something that sets us apart from much of the rest of the so-called “First World”. Something I’ve noticed all my life, and something that has grown worse in the last couple decades.
I’ve been ranting about this since the advent of Palin. (I don’t think Dubya was stupid so much as he was willfully ignorant, which is just as bad, and in some ways worse.)
The basis of much of the support of Palin in 2008, as near as I could discern, was “she’s just like me.” Setting aside the fact that she wasn’t “just like you” (unless you’re an ignorant, vengeful, narcissistic millionaire attention addict), the fact remains: I don’t want the most powerful person in the world to be just like me. I want them to be smarter, more experienced, more reliable, wiser, better in a crisis and under pressure, and so on. Sure, I’d like it if they share my values, but only if those values are informed by some of those other characteristics.
Why so many people are enamored with mediocrity – and why they believe the authenticity of stage persona that are more carefully crafted than any (other) advertising campaign – utterly escapes me. It’s hard to avoid the conclusion that a lot of people are just willfully stupid when it comes to discerning between what they want to believe and what actually is.
You do realize that as long as some half of the eligible voting age population chooses to stay home on election day (either because they’re disgusted with the political process or simply just don’t give a shit) that this won’t change? The slick marketing shtick is mainly geared to the rabid wingnuts and the low-information (sometimes known as “swing”) voters, and is nothing more than a cynical ploy to win elections. Unfortunately, they haven’t quite figured out the good governance part of the equation so they just substitute non-stop smear campaigning. Bottom line — progressives simply have to do it better (whether we like it or not) and occasionally appeal to people’s emotions, as opposed to always relying on logic and reason.
Off-topic:
There’s not even a Planned Parenthood within 45 miles of my house, but now the rest in the state are going to have to shutdown to meet new regulations:
http://www.slate.com/blogs/xx_factor/2011/09/16/virginia_stands_to_lose_22_clinics_that_provide_abor
tion_all_at_.html
I think democracy works in the sense that our representatives really are representative. As H.L. Menken observed, “”No one ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American public.”
So yes, we get the government we deserve, on the whole. Did we deserve shrub? You bet. It was a long involved process for him to rise to the top, and he could have bee derailed at many points along the way. In the election, I remember many progressive who argued that it didn’t matter whether a democrat or a republican won, so they voted for Nader. Who knows how many others they influenced to stay home.
Everyone who voted for Bush or Nader, or didn’t vote at all, shares some blame for the 8 year shrub nightmare. That’s most of the voting age public.
and would do it again.
We elected Obama in ’08 and what do we have? George Bush’s policies at home and abroad continue pretty much unchanged. The wars continue and programs get cut at home and taxes for the rich get reduced.
Technically, taxes for the rich got extended right? Not reduced. Unless something went through of which I’m unaware.
I hope the satisfaction you obtain from your protest vote help keep you warm while shrub and his ilk destroy the country.
also, this
You’re not alone. Fwiw, I find the use of the Dolchstoßlegende (go Google it) against Nader voters by some self-described liberals and progressives (who really should know better) to be abhorrent.
I often find reality abhorrent too. Nevertheless, Nader’s effect on the Florida vote is well documented.
“In the 2000 presidential election in Florida, George W. Bush defeated Al Gore by 537 votes. Nader received 97,421 votes, which led to claims that he was responsible for Gore’s defeat. Nader, both in his book Crashing the Party and on his website, states: “In the year 2000, exit polls reported that 25% of my voters would have voted for Bush, 38% would have voted for Gore and the rest would not have voted at all.”[69] (which would net a 13%, 12,665 votes, advantage for Gore over Bush.)”
That’s not a legend, it’s reality. And more of a stab in the neck than a stab in the back. People who don’t learn from their mistakes, who continue to their justify bad decision to waste their votes on ridiculous third party candidates in close elections, definitely deserve the idiots we end up in Washington.
I don’t know why people who go third party don’t listen to Nader’s own god damn advice that he gave on election night 2008:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k-bC7F7gD4g
I obviously agree much more with Bill Fletcher, but Nader argues to focus efforts on the Congress. While a primary on Obama might be worthwhile in theory, do they realize the amount of resources it takes, and the fact that it’s only affecting ONE person? Spend all of those resources on the Congress and you’ll get actual results and move the country in a better direction. Primarying Congress has proven results, it just takes work and organizing.
Gore was an uninspiring candidate with a neoconservative running mate who would have been a heartbeat away from the Presidency. Certainly that’s how I would have seen it from 11 years ago, and nothing has changed my mind since. Why would I support a set of candidates with whom I have serious qualms (I’m a socialist by ideology), when I might be able to find a set of candidates who more closely match my values? The only response I’ve ever received has been along the lines of “be afraid of….” That’s hardly satisfactory.
Then again, I’m not part of the Democratic Party tribe – and given the way I’ve seen leftists within the tribe treated, quite frankly I wouldn’t want to be. Somehow, I seriously doubt that the DP brass and its loyalists will figure that out, and then they will wonder why turnout didn’t live up to their fantasies.
I suppose that attititude is fine if you are primarily issue oriented as opposed to actual results oriented (much like the universal government financed single-payer or nothing crowd). Unfortunately, that’s not usually how actual government works. I guess the protest vote thing is great only if the outcome of an election is not in doubt.
There are a host of issues that I believe in and that the Democratic Party either doesn’t believe in or doesn’t think are viable issues to run on.
If I could change the Democratic Party’s mind about those things by proving to them that they will lose if they don’t purport them, then it might be worth letting the Republicans run things for four years to bring about that change in the Democrats.
The problem is that the election of Bush didn’t make the Democrats run to embrace any part of Ralph Nader’s platform. Mostly the opposite, actually.
If Gore had won and become president, we might be dealing with a President Lieberman at the moment. I’m aware of the law of unintended consequences. But I’d probably trade even a President Lieberman for not having had to go through the two Bush terms. He created so much destruction, and it was all so predictable.
Maybe I’m looking for different results. So far, thirty years of neoliberalism (or what was called late capitalism briefly in the 1980s and 1990s) isn’t exactly working out for the vast majority of us. For the CEO class and its willing servants in DC I suppose life’s just grand. Keep giving time, money and votes to those who keep pushing the same sorry economic policies, and you keep getting the same sorry results. Jast sayin’.
Maybe, after the terrible choices we’ve made as a country over the past half century, we deserve things to be fairly shitty for a while. Let the third world catch up to us for a bit while we tread water. All those jobs that were outsourced to the far east are pulling vast swaths of humanity out of poverty, so thats something at least. In a few years I expect things will be start to get better here too, provided we don’t continue to make the same mistakes. Like electing idiots to important positions.
Jon Stewart had a comment on this, back during the 2008 campaign, when some folks on the right were complaining that Obama “acts like he thinks he’s better than everybody else.”
Stewart said: “If you’re running for president and you don’t think you’re better than everyone else… what the fuck are you doing?”
The fixation with “book learning” is a red herring. Obama didn’t just go to a fancy school. He’s able to hold intelligent conversations with people and defend his positions. He addressed the Republicans, a hostile audience, and made them look so bad they cried foul. Bush on the other hand couldn’t handle anything but a friendly audience, and often made a fool of himself then.
I certainly agree that the college you went to doesn’t determine you’ll be a good President. Harry Truman didn’t even have a college degree, but he was certainly completely able.
What convinced me that Geroge W Bush wasn’t qualified to be President wasn’t knowing he was a C student; it was seeing him in the first debate with Al Gore. I laugh at Sarah Palin not because she’d inexperienced, but because she talks in word salads, she insisted Alaska’s proximity to Russia gave her credibility for assuming higher office,and she couldn’t handle an interview that included hardball questions like what do you like to read?