LITTLE ROCK — When workers in the former East Germany had the temerity to rise up against their Marxist masters in 1953, members of the communist Writers Union distributed leaflets demanding that the workers labor twice as hard to win back the confidence ofthe government.
Even poet and playwright Bertolt Brecht, a committed Marxist, recognized the absurdity of blaming the people for the failure of their leaders.
“Would it not be easier in that case,” Brecht asked, “for the government to dissolve the people and elect another ?”
As the magnitude of the November 2nd electoral disaster for Democrats comes into perspective, many of the party’s leaders and their supporters in the press seem to have taken Brecht’s satiric observation seriously. According to them, the American people are just too stupid to realize how wonderful their governance has been.
Vice President Joe Biden, on ABC’s This Week, explained that the public just doesn’t have the mental capacity to grasp the brilliance of the Obama administration’s monumentally spendthrift legislative packages: “The vast majority of the American people and a lot of people really involved don’t even know what’s inside the packages.”
Senator John Kerry postulated that citizens who oppose the Obama-Pelosi-Reid agenda suffer from a mass case of attention deficit disorder. “We have an electorate that doesn’t always pay that much attention to what’s going on,” he told reporters in Boston, “so people are influenced by a simple slogan rather than the facts or the truth or what’s happening.”
According to Washington Post columnist Stephen Pearlstein, a person’s intelligence is inversely proportional to his or her distance from the nation’s capital: “The dirty little secret is that most Americans don’t really know what they think about the issues that so animate the political conversation in Washington, and what they think they know about them is often wrong.”
For Time columnist Joe Klein, criticism of the technocratic brilliance of Team Obama is a sign of civilizational decline: “There is something profoundly diseased about a society that idolizes its ignoramuses and disdains its experts. It is a society that no longer takes itself seriously.”
Really.
For 21 months, these are the geniuses who said that if you opposed a so-called stimulus bill that cost nearly $1 trillion, you were greedy; if you objected to the government takeover of failed corporations, you were uncaring; if you thought Obamacare would do more harm than good, you were selfish; if you wanted the nation’s immigration laws enforced, you were racist; and if you thought an Islamic cultural center near Ground Zero might hurt rather than promote inter-religious understanding, you were xenophobic.
These guys are so smart, yet they’re oblivious as to why Democrats are facing an electoral Armageddon. And so from the Oval Office-“they cling to guns or religion”-on down, they’ve constructed the last great insult: Americans are just too stupid to comprehend their greatness.
If only they could elect the citizenry.
On November 2nd, the citizenry will deliver what President Obama likes to call a teachable moment. The only question is this: Are these political prodigies capable of learning their lesson?
Editorial, Pages 88 on 10/24/2010