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Smart and Dumber
Why intellectuals love the president's brainless rhetoric.
Republicans who favor Newt Gingrich over Mitt Romney are making a big mistake, New York Times conservative
Ross Douthat
argues in an extraordinarily interesting column. Support for Gingrich,
Douthat argues, arises from "a desperate desire to somehow beat Barack
Obama at his own game, and to explode what conservatives consider the
great fantasy of the 2008 campaign--the conceit that Obama possessed an
unmatched brilliance and an unprecedented eloquence."
That is a mistake, Douthat argues, because everybody has already figured out that the emperor is unclad:
It isn't 2008 anymore, and conservatives don't actually need
to explode the fantasy of Obama's eloquence and omnicompetence. The
harsh reality of governing has already done that for them. Nobody awaits
the president's speeches with panting anticipation these days, or
expects him to slay his opponents with the power of his intellect.
Obamamania peaked with the inauguration, and it's been ebbing ever
since.
We've been sounding the theme of Obama's intellectual inadequacy since at least
October 2010. Our colleague
Bret Stephens
was also ahead of the game with his August 2011 column titled "Is Obama
Smart?" Lately, though, the subject has been much more widely remarked
upon, especially after the president's latest dreadful speech, last week
in Kansas. The usually mild-mannered
Peter Wehner of Commentary declared the president a "political hack":
In his speech in Osawatomie, Kansas, President Obama took
another stab at summarizing the philosophy of the Republican Party. And
this is the best Obama could do: "Their philosophy is simple: We are
better off when everybody is left to fend for themselves and play by
their own rules."
This is a silly and intentionally misleading
statement--silly because it's so transparently false and intentionally
misleading because the president surely cannot believe his own rhetoric.
The problem for Obama is it's becoming a pattern. Earlier this year, he
charged that Republicans want the elderly, autistic children and
children with Down syndrome to "fend for themselves."
After that, he told us the GOP plan is "dirtier air, dirtier water, less people with health insurance." . . .
These are the kinds of things a politically desperate and
intellectually bankrupt politician says. The president must believe he
cannot win a debate on philosophy on the merits, so he instead employs
the crudest caricatures he can.
The Washington Examiner's
Michael Barone:
Democrats like to think of themselves as the party of smart
people. And over the last four years we have heard countless encomiums,
and not just from Democrats, of the intellect and perceptiveness of
Barack Obama. But a reading of the text of Obama's December 6 speech at
Osawatomie, Kansas, billed as one of his big speeches of the year, shows
him to be something like the opposite.
Even by the standards of campaign rhetoric, this is a
shockingly shoddy piece of work. . . . What's really staggering is the
weakness of his public policy arguments. The long-term unsustainability
of our entitlement programs he blames solely on the 2001 and 2003 tax
cuts--an explanation no serious observer regards as anything but
incomplete, to say the least. He points to growing income inequality and
to remedy it advocates policies that are utterly inadequate to the
task. We need to be "making education a national mission," he says, and
in essence argues for channeling more money to teacher union members.
Douthat, however, deserves some special credit. Given the eagerness
of New York Times liberals to find ways of charging conservatives with
racism, it takes some courage for a New York Times conservative to
disparage the intellect of the first black president.
"What we have here, it seems [is] a
president who has no serious interest in public policy," Barone
concludes. "Those who pride themselves on belonging to the party of
smart people should be embarrassed."
A smart Democrat might observe that, unlike the children of Lake
Wobegon, the American electorate includes many people who are below
average. They're entitled to a little representation, as Sen. Roman
Hruska famously observed; and outside a few college-town districts, no
politician will ever win election by appealing only to the far right of
the bell curve. By this argument, Obama's populist appeal has a
practical justification, even if its content is embarrassing.
But the funny thing about "populism" is that it doesn't seem to be very popular. As
Mickey Kaus observes (ellipses in original):
So pro-business, centrist chief of staff William Daley is
demoted, Obama moves to a feisty, fight back, progressive posture,
casting Republicans as the party of the 1%, and . . . he
loses three points in Ohio? Isn't Ohio one of the states where populism is supposed to work? . . . The poll in question was taken before Obama's big "inequality" speech in Kansas. Still . . . the shift's been going on for weeks. . . . Look at this chart of the President's national approval rating and tell me it's working.
Yet it would overstate the case to say that Obama's so-called
populism, or "flopulism" in Kaus's droll portmanteau, is completely
without appeal. There is one group that just loved the Kansas speech.
Among its members were journalists like
E.J. "Baghdad Bob" Dionne,
Joe Klein and the editorial board of the
New York Times, along with academics such as
Robert Reich,
Geoffrey Stone and
Michael Kazin.
There's an irony for you. The one group to which the president's
brainless bashing of businessmen and conservatives appeals consists
of . . . intellectuals. Or, as Barone puts it, "those who pride
themselves on belonging to the party of smart people." Obama's appeal to
these self-styled brainiacs is not reasoned but emotional: He taps into
their resentments.
The lefty intellectual resents successful businessmen and
conservatives because they threaten his own sense of superiority.
Wealthy businessmen's material success is a mark of higher status than
the professor or journalist's mere affluence. Conservative politicians
act as if the lefty intellectual is not morally superior. In addition,
conservative intellectuals challenge his sense of cognitive superiority.
Within journalism and academia conservatives are smarter than liberals
on average, because the former are those who have managed to succeed
despite going against the grain ideologically.
Left-liberal intellectuals, then, fail to appreciate the intellectual
shallowness of the president's class-warfare rhetoric because it
seduces them by reinforcing their own superiority over competing elites.
The Kleins and Dionnes, Reichs and Kazins are never going to be won
over by Newt Gingrich, no matter how well he does in debate against
Obama. Is anyone else? Douthat plausibly doubts it:
Gingrich might debate circles around Obama. He might implode
spectacularly, making a hot mess of himself while the president keeps
his famous cool. But either way, setting up a grand rhetorical showdown
seems unlikely to supply a disillusioned country with what it's looking
for from Republicans in 2012.
Conservatives may want catharsis, but the rest of the public
seems to mainly want reassurance. They already know Barack Obama isn't
the messiah he was once cracked up to be. What they don't know is
whether they can trust anyone else to do better.
This is the best argument against Gingrich that we've heard. Everyone old enough to remember the late 1990s is aware of
his weaknesses.
But Douthat raises a pertinent question about the former speaker's
greatest strength. Anyone who's watched the Republican debates this year
knows Gingrich is capable of performing dazzlingly. But if Douthat is
right about the degree to which Obama's intellect has already been
discounted (except among lefty intellectuals), a dazzling debate
performance may be neither necessary nor sufficient to defeat the
president.
Another possibility occurs to us: What if Gingrich does get elected
president after out-debating weak opponents, then proceeds to overread
his mandate and overreach in ways that prove disastrous to his party?
That pretty well describes what happened with the guy who won in 2008.
Newt
Gingrich is at his scrappy best as the underdog or minority leader. He
tends to get into trouble when he's riding high and begins to let his
sense of personal historical destiny get the better of his judgment. Now
that he's leading in the GOP presidential polls, the big question is
whether he can control his tendency toward condescension and vainglory.![[botwt1212]](https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/blogger_img_proxy/AEn0k_vnbxWzJw7wRCaqMrij0BfwS59ByTbmbaRUR7SAoiOkmA7eTSm0VzDS7-BM6_nwKc5QQl9-WRHKA59XxThw_inWOvb8_MZWtEnK_G5zOeKBRrKNPLVGfA1bvY0bo_DH9nAOjbGlFVZKHxqAevvDbMk5=s0-d)
December 1, 2011 at 6:03 PM
“Ernest Michaelis, for 26 years a justice of the peace and for many years the official collector of fish licenses, testified, making reference, for purpose of identification, to a photograph of the petitioner. He said he had known the parents of the boy since shortly after he himself went to live at Monterey in 1879; that there were two boys and three girls in the family; that he had seen the petitioner frequently as a little fellow when he went to collect fish licenses (the boy’s father was a fisherman); and had known him ever since; and, referring to the photograph, he declared positively that he was sure of his identity and that he was born in Monterey. He added that the father of the boy was native born and was a voter in that community.”
I smell desperation. If I ever tried to cut up quotes like this… and re-assemble them in such a recklessly cavalier manner, the Court would thrash me. It would be ugly as all hell. Nobody is submitting Frankenstein’s monster to the SCOTUS, not unless they want to be reemed out in oral argument.
The CRS memo is so full of holes… swiss cheese of the rotten variety. I would take a sledgehammer to it, but all I need is a xylophone mallet. Coming soon…
Leo