This post makes me sad. One of the most corrosive forces in modern American politics is the idea that anyone who disagrees with you, or sits on the other side of the isle, can't possibly have a rational reason for it. So they must be dumb, or evil, or both.
If you don't understand why people think the way they do -- beyond "they must be dumb, there's no other explanation" -- then you'll have a harder time beating them, whether in an argument or an election.
Besides, idiotic and ineffective mud-slinging is par for the course in any election. Either side. People made fun of Kerry over ketchup. Bush was unfit for the presidency because he was a cheerleader. If that bothers you, don't just switch it on 'em.
And this:
I think it is a big mistake to consider Palin to be "dumb," and suspect that is part of the rationale behind the selection. she gave an interview to Maria Bartiromo for CNBC, and on the subject of energy, she is very conversant. Yes, she advocates the "drill here, drill now" philosophy, but she does so in a way that will appeal to Mr. and Mrs. NASCAR, and even more so with creationist/pro-life NASCAR Gimme CHEAP Gas crowd.
I want to be very clear here. The point isn't that Palin is stupid--it isn't even neccessarily Palin. The point is that a strategy that seeks to make an issue out of Honest Tea and arugula, to preach intelligent design as science, to claim govenorship of Alaska as foreign policy is dishonest and an appeal to ignorance. Palin's intelligence is beside the point--equating intelligent design with evoloution is either, on its face, ignorance or an appeal to ignorance. Arguing that arugula consumption should have something to do with presidency is either ignorance--or an appeal to it. Now, you may not agree with that formulation--but it clearly isn't the same as saying that Palin--or anyone who disagrees with me--is dumb.
It's also worth saying that Asher is right--candidates appeal to ignorance all the time. I'm a lefty so I'm going to see it more in the GOP. But for what it's worth, I don't think the number of homes John McCain owns is--in and of itself--any statement on his knowledge of the economy.
The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood 
Both sides of the political spectrum have areas where they prefer to adhere to faith rather than engage in an objective analysis of the relevant facts. The difference is that there are stronger taboos against questioning the liberal articles of faith.
The difference is that there are stronger taboos against questioning the liberal articles of faith.
Well you certainly presented an impressive amount of evidence to back up your non-faith based assertion there but I am still going to disagree with you.
I've heard "they only vote for you guys because ya'll give them welfare checks" enough times to disregard such comments from GOP'ers.
Check out the link. This is the way the GOP wins elections. Its all about the perceptions they create of their opponent. Dismissing or underestimating them got us into the mess we're in now.
http://www.editorandpublisher.com/eandp/news/article_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1003844487
Fear, envy, and resentment are ALL the GOP has had to work with for the past forty years (okay, that plus their Randian cult of selfishness). And it's worked out pretty well for them.
Richard Nixon still rules our world, and people are still pretty stupid.
"Fear, envy, and resentment are ALL the GOP has had to work with for the past forty years (okay, that plus their Randian cult of selfishness)."
How can you write this with a straight face? Stoking fear, envy and resentment and selfishness have been staples of Dems in recent years. It's been a long time since Kennedy intoned "ask not what your country can do for you..."; pretty much since then, Dems have been all about what your country can do for you: help you raise your kids, pay for your college, etc., etc. All the while stoking envy and resentment of those who have managed to earn success on their own, and of course stoking fear that Republicans are going to take away your right to have abortions on demand, etc. Even after abortion has remained plenty legal after 12 years of Reagan-Bush 41, and nearly 8 years of Bush 43, lefty PACs still put those "your reproductive rights are hanging by a thread" ads in the papers.
Deleted. Ad hominem is the quickest way out.
In response to the houses gaffe: I think it is relevant in the respect that Obama is supposed to be the elitist in the election while McCain can't keep track of how many houses he has. The Dems might be stretching it by linking it to the economy, but I think it is a fair response to the elitist meme.
equating intelligent design with evoloution is either, on its face, ignorance or an appeal to ignorance.
Agreed. But so is Obama's ploy to lower gas prices with windfall taxes, or to magically rid of Middle East Oil in ten years or to stimulate the economy by building an economic iron curtain.
Fear, envy, and resentment are ALL the GOP has had to work with for the past forty years (okay, that plus their Randian cult of selfishness). And it's worked out pretty well for them. Richard Nixon still rules our world, and people are still pretty stupid.
Well, let's remember the party affiliation of the campaign that ran the 3 AM ad during the primaries. In fact, much of the attacks by McCain seem modeled after those used by the Clinton campaign, so much so, that they use her in one of the ads.
Since you bring up Nixon, it might be proper to bring up Stevenson. There is great peril in calling the electorate stupid, and then asking them to vote for your side.
What I got out of TNC's posts on Palin so far isn't that he thinks she is stupid, but doesn't like being told with a straight face that proximaty to Russia makes a difference. I cringed when I first read about the GOP pushing that point because it is quite dumb. Yes, all sides do it, Carville tried explaining why Clinton of 92 was more qualified on foreign affairs than Bush of 2000 by saying Clinton did a lot of studies in International Relations in college.
Thanks for the front page quote, TNC!
I'm sorry if my comment read like I was as criticizing you for saying Palin was dumb. You were pretty clearly calling people who vote for McCain/Palin dumb, and that's what I was reacting to.
I was making two claims:
1) The strategy of saying extremely dumb things about the opposing candidate is very common, and both sides do it;
2) Declaring that anyone who votes on the other side must be dumb is not a path to a) productive debate or b) winning elections, because you end up underestimating people's genuinely held, rational positions. They may be wrong, but they came by that wrongness honestly.
Coming from the land that gave the world Lee Atwater and Strom Thurmond, I can attest to the fact that you have hit the nail on the head.
And Huskialto is right.
And, judging from his last few entries here, Fred got lost on his way to Red State.
Asher is right--candidates appeal to ignorance all the time.
Don't think I said that. Maybe you were thinking of the guy who wrote the first post you block-quoted. All I said was that, when you ask a Governor what his foreign-policy experience is, you're going to get some stupid answers from any Governor, Dem or Repub, because they just don't have any. And that the number of Presidents we've had who jumped from the state house suggests that you might not really needany.
*Well you certainly presented an impressive amount of evidence to back up your non-faith based assertion [that there are stronger taboos against questioning the liberal articles of faith] there but I am still going to disagree with you.*
The most obvious example.
Article of faith: "All subgroups of humanity have equal statistical distributions of various traits that our society considers important (e.g., intelligence)."
Reaction to questioning: The head of a major university, and the leader (and Nobel prize winner) of a major research center have both been fired for merely suggesting this assertion needed further investigation.
Can you find similar reactions to people who question conservative articles of faith?
But then, the issue around McCain's houses isn't really that he owns a lot of houses, is really really rich, or even that he doesn't know much about economics. The issue is that the McCain campaign and the GOP at large has made the idea that Obama is an "elitist" THE central message of their campaign, while their candidate has so many "properties" he can't even tell you off hand how many houses he owns.
I agree that it wouldn't be an issue, if Republicans weren't trying to paint Obama as an elitist.
Reaction to questioning:
"Questioning" is a funny way to spell "jumped to racist/sexist conclusions on the basis of no good evidence for and ample evidence against."
Don't think I said that. Maybe you were thinking of the guy who wrote the first post you block-quoted. All I said was that, when you ask a Governor what his foreign-policy experience is, you're going to get some stupid answers from any Governor, Dem or Repub, because they just don't have any. And that the number of Presidents we've had who jumped from the state house suggests that you might not really needany.
Yes, not an appeal to ignorance. Brain went offline for a second. Still I agree with the point that Republicans generally say stupider things than Democrats. That is what you meant isn't it?
In all seriousness, I read the point agreed with it and then mangled it went to write.
The issue is that the McCain campaign and the GOP at large has made the idea that Obama is an "elitist" THE central message of their campaign, while their candidate has so many "properties" he can't even tell you off hand how many houses he owns.
I mean, I don't really see the contradiction. I'm a snob and an elitist in some respects, and I only have about 800 bucks in my student banking account. Conversely, some people are very wealthy and not elitists at all - though they are of course members of an elite group, but being elite and being an elitist are two different things. When people think elitist they think Bill Buckley, not Bill Gates.
Chet: *"Questioning" is a funny way to spell "jumped to racist/sexist conclusions on the basis of no good evidence for and ample evidence against."*
Fail.
Larry Summers was careful not to draw any conclusions. He hypothesized that a difference in sigma for male and female intelligence distributions could result in female under-representation at high levels, followed by a back of the envelope calculation (taking numbers from the "Xie and Shauman paper"). In the Q&A period, he was careful to point out that he wasn't sure.
Here is the text of his speech. Feel free to prove me wrong.
http://www.president.harvard.edu/speeches/2005/nber.html
Watson I know less about, but wikipedia doesn't turn up any incorrect statements. His comments were along the lines of "all our social policies [concerning Africa] are based on the fact that their intelligence is the same as ours – whereas all the testing says not really". I don't know about the social policies, but he is correct about testing (note that this isn't even a racial statement, though it was interpreted as such).
Could you show me some of Watson's incorrect comments? Please also provide the evidence against them.
Deleted. Cleaner please.
This is Rick Perlstein deal, right? They lie because they want you to call them on it, and then they can throw their hissy fit.
wow, i got deleted...for no good reason. it was not a person attack and cited legislation and you leave all this other stuff up. huh?
Further on McCain's houses. I think that what has kept this issue alive is that most of us think McCain is lying. When asked how many houses he and his wife own, he didn't want to answer with a large number so he pleaded ignorance. Since no one can prove that he was lying, we take him at his word and pretend that we are shocked by a man so out of touch with the problems of ordinary people that the doesn't even know how many houses he has. That doesn't ring true, though, even in a rich guy. What gives this legs is the contempt we feel for McCain because he lied instead of answering.
Every pundit on cable tv is claiming that by choosing Palin, McCain has proven his bona fides as a maverick. This is total BS. McCain wanted Lieberman, but Karl Rove told him no dice. So McCain picks someone that the religious right is happy with. McCain is not a maverick, he's a eunuch.
Not that this matters, but I don't think he lied. I think he's married to a gazillionaire and honestly doesn't have perfect knowledge of the extent of her holdings. Many of them are investment properties, so it's very conceivable that he knows next to nothing about them.
The house thing probably wouldn't matter so much if 1) he wasn't already playing the elitism card and just walked into it himself and 2) his economic advisor called us a nation of whiners over the economy.
"Conversely, some people are very wealthy and not elitists at all - though they are of course members of an elite group, but being elite and being an elitist are two different things. When people think elitist they think Bill Buckley, not Bill Gates.
Posted by Asher | August 31, 2008 9:37 PM"
This does seem to be a very specific attribute of American life since Nixon, not a general shared idea about what is an elitist shared across time and borders. After all, Bill Gates went to the best prep school in Seattle, his mom served on the board of the United Way with his future early investors, he went to Harvard (before dropping out) and according to Wikipedia, "also among Gates's private acquisitions is the Codex Leicester, a collection of writings by Leonardo da Vinci, which Gates bought for $30.8 million at an auction in 1994.[39] Gates is also known as an avid reader, and the ceiling of his large home library is engraved with a quotation from The Great Gatsby." The biography isn't that different from William F. Buckley in terms of education.
These days "elitist" is just a way to paint your political opponent as The Other over populist cultural bullshit. Liking good iced tea and greens is somehow elitist because having standards is apparently for gay Ivy Leaguers. A lot of it is right wingers projecting their own inadequacies onto others, like how David Brooks wants to think he's a man of the people because he wrote a book stereotyping people in the suburbs and exburbs. He does seem ashamed to be teaching at Harvard Law and wishes he was instead out chopping wood. The right has taken Marxist and Maoist fetishism of an imaginary working class without college educations and co-opted it for the American right's use. Yelling "elitist" a lot is just a way to tell the world you are a self-hating pseudo-intellectual.
Gates is also known as an avid reader, and the ceiling of his large home library is engraved with a quotation from The Great Gatsby.
See, that isn't elitist at all; it's almost trashy, really. Engraving the ceiling of your library with something you probably read in high school? Engraving quotations on ceilings is out of style, of course, but if you do it it can't be something that's just 80 years old.
Actually the houses thing boils down to two valid criticisms:
1) The day before he declared the economy was strong. It merely serves as context that for people that can afford 7 houses, that we apparently do indeed have a strong economy, and presumably that's the only economy that McCain is cognizant of or cares about.
2) By not answering the question of how many (even if the answer was one) he was either unaware of his personal economy or too cowardly to admit that he is as far off the median as he is.
He's got 7? Good for him. Just be honest about the fact that you have 7, and don't blow smoke up our asses on how great the economy when for most people with only one house the economy sucks. And we outnumber the 7 house people, so any generalized economic comment should reflect our view and not yours.
"Many of them are investment properties, so it's very conceivable that he knows next to nothing about them."
Fair enough. Then say 'We have 4 houses that we live in, and some number that we hold for investment purposes, but I'm not clear on how many because my wife handles the investment stuff and I don't keep up with it while I campaign." That's a perfectly valid and accurate answer and would have dispensed with at least half of the issue.