Redstate

By Dana R Pico Posted in Spotlight Blogs | User Blogs — Comments (0) / Email this page » / Leave a comment »

Eric, reviewing former Vice President Gore's book, Earth in the Balance, wrote:

A large part of the problem is that the intelligence and seriousness so often devolve into moral and intellectual pomposity, as evidenced in grandiose statements like “We must all become partners in a bold effort to change the very foundations of our civilization.” Who, after all, upon reading such a fatuous comment, would not want to take the author and swat him with a rolled up newspaper?

While I admit to laughing almost to tears when I pictured that image in my mind, it also occurred to me just how much of a problem this really is for our Democratic friends.

They spent much of 2000 trying to create the perception that an MBA graduate from Harvard was an idiot (to the point that they fooled themselves, and getting themselves outsmarted by that idiot)) while their candidate, who managed to flunk out of divinity school (quite an accomplishment, that!), was being sold to us as a great intellectual.

And maybe they were successful: Mr Gore won a plurality of the popular vote. Unfortunately for him (though very fortunately for the country), his votes were too heavily concentrated in too small an area, and he lost big swaths of the country, and that cost him the Electoral College.

Four years later, another Democratic brain tried to persuade us that the President of the United States was stupid; remember his famous line, "I can't believe I'm losing to that idiot!"

Well, Senator Kerry might have realized that maybe, just maybe, trying to campaign as a Boston intellectual wasn't necessarily the way to win votes in the heartland, and thus his famous (thanks to Rush Limbaugh), "Is this where I can buy me a huntin' license?" It just wasn't natural, people could see that it was fake, deliberately fake, and Mr Kerry did lose to "that idiot."

But the younger George Bush is hardly the first Republican presidential candidate that the Democrats have tried to portray as an idiot. Ronald Reagan, in 1980, was an idiot, running against an experienced president and a nuclear engineer. President Reagan in 1984, we were told, slept through staff meetings and was just out of it.

They couldn't portray the elder George Bush as an idiot, so they tried to tell us he was a wimp, and the guy "born with a silver foot in his mouth," running against the brilliant and successful Mike Dukakis.

When did the Democrats actually win? That was when they ran a regular guy (Bill Clinton, even though he was a Rhodes Scholar, came across as a regular guy), and didn't try to run down their opponents personally; Bill Clinton attacked the elder President Bush's record in office, which is certainly fair game.

Two things stand out to me. First, in the campaigns where one side based much of its campaign on attacking the other personally, the attacking side lost. (The Republicans did it, too, in 1992, 1996 and 2000, losing the first two, and losing the popular vote in the third.) It seems to me that when the public see one side reduced to personal attacks (rather than criticism of the opponent's record), the public know that the attacking side has little else.

Second, it seems that the American people prefer regular guys as president. (The Dukakis campaign, in its efforts to persuade the American people that Governor Dukakis was a brilliant intellectual, managed to make over Vice President Bush, Yale graduate and Washington insider extraordinaire, into a regular guy!)

I wonder if maybe, just maybe, the American people don't elect Harvard intellectuals because they just feel too disconnected with Harvard intellectuals. And that's why Eric wants to smack Mr Gore with a rolled up newspaper!