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The Smart/Shrewd Divide

Posted by ROBERT STEIN in Politics, Society.
Sep 8th, 2008 | Comments

After eight years of obstinate stupidity in the White House, the change voters should want most is a combination of common sense and common decency.

“You can’t beat brains,” JFK used to say, but this year’s debate has somehow been shifted to a mistrust of intelligence–at first by Hillary Clinton’s attacks on Barack Obama as naïve, followed by John McCain’s claims of wisdom only through suffering and now by Sarah Palin’s salty assertion of hockey-mom shrewdness.

What will be at stake in the next two months is how Americans judge the qualities of mind they want in a president. The threat of terrorism, the woes of the economy, the endangered environment require more than a sound-bite mentality and a determination to, in the most frequently used word in McCain’s acceptance speech, “fight” and respond to mindless chants of “drill, baby, drill.”

In the campaign, Barack Obama’s open-mindedness is being distorted into irresolution, but what he would bring, as conservative David Brooks noted almost two years ago, is “a deliberative style to the White House [that] will multiply his knowledge, not divide it.”

More here.

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jwest

Joe Lieberman – opportunist?

Good luck selling that.

DLS

Good luck selling the stupid stuff to the smart. It won't be easy.

Meanwhile, a lot of smart people are attracted to the common sense and common decency of Sarah Palin, as has been evident since a week ago this past Sunday.

JSpencer

Excellent point Robert, and it goes to the heart of this election. Will there be reason to hope for a pulling up from this dive or will the populace again be swayed by base appeals to those folks who have such difficulty thinking these questions through?

"Obama himself and those who support him know he doesn't have all the answers, but he will be asking the right questions and bringing to bear what the best minds have to offer in searching for solutions."

Exactly. Do we want "experience" and cleverness, or do we want someone who asks the right questions, has actual intellectual curiousity, and realizes how much work we have ahead of us. In otherwords, do we respond to the fear message or the hope message? Do we want to keep digging the hole or get out of it?

DLS

"[W]ill the populace again be swayed by base appeals to those folks who have such difficulty thinking these questions through?"

Oh, it's very likely we're going to go Democratic this year, especially when so many promises of more government goodies are being made to so many people in addition to the Feel Good nature of the Obama campaign and the slick packaging. Base appeals and exploiting a lack of thinking once again, indeed.

* * *

"the fear message or the hope message"

Fearing dishonestly-presented-and-hyped "more of the same" and hoping for vague, Feel-Good "change", back to the 1960s? They're not mutually exclusive.

Now "change" that means putting a muzzle on Washington where it's needed, including on total spending, that's something to Hope for. It remains to be seen if it's realistic or even if McCain will correctly pursue this as a major policy objective.

kryon77

It's a typical smug piece of Democratic tripe for these twits to imagine their opponents stupid, and themselves smart. But it's not indicated by the evidence.

When you strip away all the so-called nuance, the umms and ahhhs and "you know"s, the meandering clauses that lead to dead ends, the self-referential idolatry, i.e., all the crap from Obama's sentences, there isn't much left.

When has this guy ever said anything intelligent or even interesting?

One example - anyone?

JSpencer

After reading that waste of perfectly good words, I can only imagine you must be directing the question to yourself.

Rudi

K77 says: t's a typical smug piece of Democratic tripe for these twits to imagine their opponents stupid, and themselves smart. But it's not indicated by the evidence.
...

When has this guy ever said anything intelligent or even interesting?

Larison says the same about the McClown-Palin ticket.
http://www.amconmag.com/larison/2008/09/06/dril...
However, that’s been the m.o. of the McCain campaign since last year: biography politics together with sloganeering and rote talking points instead of policy substance. This was more or less how McCain’s primary campaign went: “Surge! Victory! Surge, Earmarks Are Bad, Surge, I Was a POW, Victory, Tax Cuts, Surge, Cause Greater Than Oneself, Surge!” Since securing the nomination, he has not given many major policy addresses.
...
When McCain doesn’t know much about policy, and the VP nominee has to be brought up to speed to be on McCain’s level of policy ignorance, their speechwriters aren’t going to burden them with a lot of specific details, since these might prompt questions and require the candidates to understand what they just said. When McCain does not understand that his own preferred policy of cap-and-trade involves mandatory restrictions on emissions, can’t keep straight which forces Iran is supposed to be backing inside Iraq and admits that he knows little about economics, first among the many other subjects about which he knows little, what is he going to talk about? He will talk about being held captive and he will talk about reform–beautiful, nebulous, undefined reform. Not to mention drilling.

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