Andrew Sullivan provides a provocative anecdote this morning:
On the one hand, I feel Andrew’s pain. As was the case with a lot of conservatives, the Clintons’ popularity constantly irritated me in 1990s. What I found especially grating was the way Clinton admirers credited the then-president for our prosperity. The fact that a boom based on ludicrous valuations of worthless dot-coms (among other overpriced entities) either caused or greatly exaggerated our temporary prosperity rubbed further salt in the wounds. But “the people are dolts” argument that Andrew offers is never a winner in politics, even if Andrew has found one particularly ill-informed individual to buttress it. What’s more, the argument sounds especially petty in the wake of a defeat. If you want to run a winning campaign, the last thing you want to do is become Bob Dole beseeching America, “Where’s the outrage?” That question implied that voting Americans were too obtuse to make sense of the world around them. An additional problem with falling back on the “people are dolts” truism is that it’s too easy. It signals surrender, that you’re not even going to try to persuade the voters because, after all, they’re so flawed as to be beyond persuasion. The day after the 2006 midterm elections, one of my favorite readers sent me an email imploring me to not slag on my countrymen for failing to vote in the manner I had prescribed. I doubt I would have offered such a column anyway, but the letter offered a sober reminder of a few notions that I hold dear: The American people are good, just and wise. If my side had lost an election, it was by definition our fault. It wasn’t as if the American people’s sagacity which had been so evident in 2004 had suddenly evaporated. The fundamental problem with Obama supporters is they want it both ways. They saluted the American people after his triumph in Iowa. Now they’ve decided that the country is being overwhelmed by halfwits after Pennsylvania. In truth, Andrew Sullivan’s friend notwithstanding, Obama is the issue. He was a brilliant and attractive candidate in Iowa. Can even the most deluded Obama partisan deny that he looks a lot less special now than he did three months ago? In this key area, the pro-Obama echo chamber does the Obama campaign no favors. Obama has real problems that he has to address. Instead, the campaign wishes to slough off these concerns as “distractions.” His supporters enable this self-defeating strategy by working themselves into a lather whenever the “distractions” become prominent. Given the Obama campaign’s dilatory response to existential threats, I’ve posited in many private conversations that it would have been better for John McCain if Jeremiah Wright had become a household name around Labor Day instead of Valentine’s Day. Alas, the Obama campaign will still have 6+ months to right itself. And yet Team Obama’s every instinct, and their supporters’ every instinct, is to insist that the Obama campaign doesn’t need righting, but that the American people do. We’ll see how that strategy works out in November.
