The 2010 election has devolved in its closing days into a battle – familiar in American history and high school alike – over who’s stupid, and who’s a snob.
Republican candidates have served up their share of bloopers — humanoid mice, sunspots causing climate change – and Democrats have taken the expected delight in their opponents’ stumbles. But they’ve taken their mockery one step further – contending as a part of their closing argument that the tea party movement, its champion Sarah Palin, and the left’s favorite Republican candidate, Christine O’Donnell, are, frankly, dumb.
Palin “has made ignorance fashionable,” the New York Times’ Maureen Dowd wrote Wednesday, comparing the Alaska Governor’s intellect – unfavorably – to Marilyn Monroe’s.
Rachel Maddow occupied her MSNBC show Tuesday night mocking a series of Republican figures, laughing through a clip of O’Donnell’s attempt to explain that the phrase “separation of church and state” doesn’t appear in the Constitution, a point that drew nothing but ridicule on the left and in the British press. “The crowd is laughing at you,” she said as O’Donnell appeared on-screen.
Republicans say this strategy will work about as well this year as it did when used against Ronald Reagan.
But the Democrats are just getting started. Their laughter will be noisiest in a rally on the Mall on the eve of the midterm election, led by two comedians who have reveled in mocking the resurgent conservative grassroots. Comedy Central’s Stephen Colbert and Jon Stewart have tapped into the Democratic Party’s ironic, scornful mood.
In doing so, they’ve also brought to light some of the party’s most self-destructive tendencies, the elitism and condescension that Bill Clinton sought to purge in the 1990s, when he matched a progressive agenda with the persona of a likeable “Bubba” to win two terms. Not many Democrats could pull it off. Charges of elitism dogged John Kerry in 2004 and resurfaced against Barack Obama at his lowest points in Pennsylvania in the spring of 2008, when he was recorded saying that small town people “cling” to their faith and their guns.
And President Obama himself has given his blessing to the election-eve irony-fest on the Mall, planning to appear on Stewart’s show in advance of the rally and plugging it in a recent appearance in Ohio, suggesting that Stewart’s point was to rally a silent, “sane” majority. The embrace led conservative Washington Post columnist Charles Krauthammer to label the party the “Colbert Democrats” and to warn that “the hip face of the new liberalism” would leave the broader electorate decisively “not amused.”
Stewart’s version of sanity is easily confused with condescension. Like donning a tricorn hat and belting country music to celebrate tea party victories last month. A typical shot at Nevada Senate candidate Sharron Angle earlier this month: “She wants to dissolve the Post Office and send all her messages through angels.”
Surely, Angle has said some questionable things — but it's probably still bad politics for the Democrats to be seen as “eggheads” (a term of derision used by Adlai Stevenson’s critics in the 1950s) and “pointy-headed liberals” (as they were known in the glory days of Spiro Agnew.)
Waging battle over the Politics of Dumbness may not be smart for Democrats.
“The Washington elite isn't just blind to the wave, it is fueling the wave of anti-elite resentment,” said the Republican consultant Alex Castellanos. “Laughing at the tea party proves their point — Washington doesn't listen to people outside the Beltway.”
“There is a tendency now in the Democratic Party not only to disagree with, but to belittle political opponents,” said former Clinton pollster Doug Schoen, who accused Obama of “blaming the voters.”
He called the posture “counterproductive,” and indeed, the Democrats have provoked the almost automatic backlash.
“These are some of the most arrogant words ever uttered by an American president,” former Bush speechwriter Michael Gerson wrote of a recent Obama comment about how voters were responding to Republicans out of fear. Gerson interpreted it as saying that Republicans had lapsed into reliance on their “lizard brains” while Democrats used their higher faculties.
Whether Obama’s comments were really that far beyond the pale – Michael Kinsley, in POLITICO, suggested the president should think he’s smarter than most of his citizens -- they certainly expressed a common view among Democratic leaders.
Ours is a complex message. The tea party message is pretty easy and simple and direct,” Pennsylvania Governor Ed Rendell said recently.
Even Clinton got in on the act: “They got the wrestling federation lady in Connecticut and the witchcraft lady in Delaware – I tell you, so far, they’ve gathered up everybody for this tea party but the Mad Hatter.”
The Democrats may be burnt by the same backlash that has singed Republican Establishment figures like Karl Rove, jabbed by Palin for his lack of faith in O’Donnell, then smacked by Rush Limbaugh for suggesting that the Tea Party movement lacks “sophistication,” as Rove put it.
The mocking Democrats – and the inevitable backlash against sneering elites – is nothing new. Clinton, with his Arkansas roots and his deliberate identification with the lower middle class, was intent on binding his party back to its natural constituency of white workers.
But the tension has always been there in American politics. In earlier eras, it was Washington elites sneering at Jacksonian Democrats, abolitionists deriding ill-educated Irish immigrants, Republicans viewing Populists as “a bunch of crazy know-nothings,” said the historian Michael Kazin of Georgetown University.
“The idea of people in an insurgent movement being idiots is something that gets used a lot by people who are well educated and know how government works, because they’re in government,” said Kazin.
The most recent insurgent movement to be mocked as naïve and ill-informed was, of course, Obama’s primary campaign, dismissed by Hillary Clinton’s camp as the product of juvenile fantasy. And you’d be forgiven for worrying about whiplash. Just two years ago, the situation was reversed, as conservatives wrung their hands over Obama’s “cult-like” hold over his ignorant young followers, and Democrats celebrated the wisdom of the masses.
But Obama has not shied away from the suggestion that the masses – whose wisdom produced his victory two years ago – have gotten a bit confused.
“Facts and science and argument [do] not seem to be winning the day all the time is because we're hard-wired not to always think clearly when we're scared. And the country is scared,” Obama said, though there was more reason for fear in the depths of the financial crisis in November, 2008, than there is now.
This is not to say that Republican candidates – and O’Donnell in particular – haven’t had their share of extremely dumb statements. O’Donnell worried publicly in 2007 that ”American scientific companies are cross-breeding humans and animals and coming up with mice with fully functioning human brains,” one of many quotes that can be found on a website devoted to “Dumb Quotes by Delaware GOP Senate Candidate Christine O'Donnell.”
Other Republican candidates have contributed to the fun: The frontrunner for Senate from Wisconsin blamed global warming on “sunspots,” while the fading GOP nominee for governor of Colorado worried that bike sharing was part of a U.N. conspiracy.
But the Democrats’ bitter, sarcastic mood helps explain why O’Donnell – a long-shot candidate in a deep blue state – has absorbed so much more of the opposition party’s attention than, say, former Rep. John Kasich, a formidable candidate for governor of Ohio whose political problems – a political insider, and a former Lehman Brothers employee – are actually better suited to the message of reform and change that the Democrats rode for the last four years.
The Democrats mockery, and the Republican momentum, reminded one veteran observer of the dueling chants that broke out at a football game between a strong academic school and its more athletic rival. During a blowout, fans of the academic school chanted, “We have higher board scores." The rejoinder from the winning team's fans: “Look at the scoreboard!"
This season, Democrats may be resting on their board scores, but they don’t count for much on the electoral scoreboard.
POLITICO
© 2010 Capitol News Company
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