I don’t think there are many conservatives at all who deny that Clinton was a masterful politician who made a real connection with voters. The fact that he was reelected in 1996 and his party made gains in the 1998 midterm elections showed that the voters had more common sense than the more extreme Republicans on issues like Whitewater and the president’s sexual pecadillos. As far as I can tell, few Republicans will deny this. But if the Democrats lose? Why, the voters are dupes/naive/evil!
Well, if the people weren’t duped, it wasn’t for want of trying!
The Republicans deployed weapons of mass distraction. They had to , they were headed for a clobbering. By an astonishing coincidence, they discovered that the situation with Iraq, which was unchanged after many years, was an utterly urgent emergency, something had to be done or the Republicans were in danger. The Republic. The Republic was in danger. Who can forget that rare moment of Pubbie candor “You don’t bring out a new product line in August”. Well, you will if I let you. Which I won’t.
On orders from the Puppetmaster, Mr. Rove, the Pubbies beat the war drum and slithered out dark insinuations about the Democrats lack of patriotic vigor. When insinuations and innuendos proved inadequate to the cause, they moved to outright lies. Whatever it takes when the Republicans are in danger…the Republic. In danger.
Personal favorite is the bald faced lie that Newt Gangrene told about Walter Mondale, exceeding even his formidable record for mendacity and hypocrisy. That was a humdinger!
Said it before, apparently to no effect. That ok, I’ll just say it again. I dont blame the people for believing lies, I blame the people who lie to them. The Republicans, in case I haven’t made that clear.
In fact, I don’t know anybody who holds the view you claim to be so common. Might I be so bold as to request a cite? Some reference, some proof that you’re not simply blowing smoke out your Nixon?
Stoid: I’m not one of the knee-jerk Clinton bashers. I see Clinton for what he is: A very good politician who campaigned as a centrist, was elected as a centrist, tried to veer to the left when he was elected, lost most of his political capital, and then straightened up and governed pretty much as a centrist. He did some good things while President, and he did some stupid things. But no more so than other presidents before him. You might be shocked to find out that I’d rate him as a better president than George Bush I.
I think your larger question is, “Do I think people were stupid for voting for Clinton?” Or more generally, “Do I think Liberals or Democrats are stupid?”
The answer is no. I don’t think they are stupid. I think that Liberals simply have a different world view. Their biases are not my biases. I may think they are wrong about certain things, but not because they are stupid.
It’s actually a very interesting question that I’ve given quite a bit of thought to, without coming to a satisfactory conclusion. If it’s a given that Republicans and Democrats are generally as smart, and generally as educated, then why the split? Why isn’t there more agreement on fundamental issues of taxes, rights, etc?
The answer, I think, is mainly cultural. For the same reason that Europeans will tolerate intrusions in their liberty far greater than Americans will. For the same reason that Europeans are much more willing to trade security for economic independence. Or why some cultures seem to continually favor strongmen and other dictators.
For instance, if I grew up watching my father’s business be destroyed by overzealous regulators, that’s going to cause me to weight anti-regulation higher than, say, worker protection. On the other hand, if you grew up seeing your father crippled in a mining accident due to substandard equipment, you’re more likely to weight worker protection higher.
There are thousands of little events in our lives that cause us to move in certain directions. They are rational choices caused by the environment.
One more thing: Individuals may be stupid. There are lots of boneheads in the Republican and Democratic parties. But The People are smart. Why? Because collectively they behave differently than they do individually. Because the smart ones wind up with more influence, the dumb ones learn from their mistakes or get marginalized, and the average person makes good and bad choices, but learns through feedback to correct them.
This is actually a fundamental concept in fields like economics, the stock market, and insurance. People behave rationally. As a whole, they can be expected to do rational things.
Maybe this is the key difference between Libertarians and statists, and to a lesser extreme, between Democrats and Republicans: Those of us on the right fundamentally trust the public to make good choices. Those on the left don’t.
I had another thought the other day that I’ve been mulling around, and this might be the place to present it - perhaps society NEEDS liberals and conservatives. If everyone agreed, what forces would be in place to prevent everyone from figuratively running off a cliff?
So maybe what we’re seeing is pure cultural evolution. We start off agreeing, and then as people start moving in one direction, other people move in the other direction as a counter. As people join sides most reflective of their own positions, the country starts to polarize. And then both sides start testing the extremes of their positions, which causes the other side to move out to their extremes. The center rebels, and pulls them back closer.
If Kang and Kodos watches this from space, they’d see a remarkably stable system that pulses back and forth from right to left, while evolving by adopting good ideas from both sides. Bad ideas get tested, opposed, and scrapped. Good ideas survive.
I think the people will make reasonably good choices too. Given all the real information. I am not saying that most people suffer from some fundamental inadequacy that they have no control over, what I said at the top and maintain is that they have shitty information. And, they are much too trusting of the information they get. And, they tend to laziness about getting better information.
So you’re saying that people that disagree with you aren’t stupid - they’re just ignorant.
I disagree. I think that basically people understand exactly what it is they are voting for. Of course, there are always surprises. Nixon wouldnt’ have been re-elected if the truth of Watergate had been known before the election.
But when it comes to matters of policy, it’s silly to think that half of the entire country is being fooled, while the other half is seeing the truth.
On the other hand:
I think much of what brought the Republicans ahead in these recent elections was the trick of getting some of the people fooled for at least some of the time. That’s what marketing is all about. There are so many products that I don’t think we really want or need, yet they’re marketed to us and enough of us buy them to keep the companies in business.
Ugly truths have a way of coming out when there’s nothing more to be done about them. Neil Bush’s Silverado scandal came out the day after George Bush was elected in 1988. Nixon managed to keep much of his administration’s mucking around in South America hush, as well as his mucking around with the Paris Peace Talks as a candidate, back in 1968 (which is illegal.)
Enough people can be duped into voting against their interests, without finding out what they signed on for until afterward. Trent Lott has announced that he’s going after abortion rights, for example—though I can’t for the life of me think of a single Republican senator who made abortion a priority during his campaign. Even if there were one or two such senators, this certainly wasn’t at the top of their campaign agenda this year. But they’re what we’ve got now…
I never said that. I think most people, no matter where they fall on the political spectrum, are grossly under-informed and under-educated about most things, and I think they make their decisions based on very narrow and often silly things.
Recall that my “you funny” remark was specific to your assertion that people are reasonably well informed. Period. So it would be good if you’d stop stretching it to fit your partisan assertions.
And you never addressed what I said about campaign finance and advertising in relation to this, so I’ll ask more specific questions:
- Do you think advertising is a thorough, fair, and acceptable source of information, about anything at all?
- Do you think it is about political candidates in particular?
- Do you think people are affected by advertising?
- If you think not, why is so much money spent on it?
- If you think so, does this belief coincide with a “yes” to Question #1?
- If people are affected by advertising, (as the enormous sums devoted to it would indicate, and the fact that the best-funded candidates get elected would seem to indicate), and advertising is inherently, at best, incomplete (a matter which I’m not sure you agree with yet), and at worst, grossly dishonest and manipulative (ditto), how can you honestly assert that people are reasonably well-informed?
- Does it not follow that if advertising is working, and working powerfully well, that people are not well-informed? And the reverse, that if people are truly well-informed, that advertising is a waste of money?
Sam: your thoughts on how society needs opposing forces is well taken and I agree with the sentiment. This seems quite worthy of a GD thread.
Sam: I’m not sure what you’re referring to here. Do you think drugs should not be tested before being put on the market? Or that disclosure rules for companies that market health-related products should be relaxed?
On Drug policy, as a registered Democrat, I’d espouse that:
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Drug companies generally cannot be trusted to always (note emphasis: “always”) market drugs that are safe. A federal watchdog of some sort is needed to monitor the industry and make sure that shortcuts are not taken.
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For unregulated ‘health’ products, snake-oil is the general rule. There are thousands of unregulated “diet supplements” that can kill you and people who should know better do the wrong thing and trust the drug or supplement industries’ claims and they die. Is it a bad thing that a) more disclosure, and b) tight regulation, prevent deaths from dangerous substances market as cures?
I’m sorry, I disagree: The GOP is a party that generally combines the interests of big business and social conservatives, the Dems are the party that combines the interests of social liberals and advocates of controls on big business. Niether is ‘good’ or ‘bad’, they are ultimately influenced by thier core constituencies’ interests.
Just wanted to let you know Sam, I don’t often save political stuff, but I saved that. That was good.
One factor that no one seems to have addressed as yet in the thread is the HUGE number of eligible voters in this country who do not participate in the process (in VA, only 35% of eligible voters bothered to vote in the recent Senate race, which was a decidedly one-sided affair to begin with) and what accounts for those numbers. Why the mass disaffection?
Sam Stone said, “But when it comes to matters of policy, it’s silly to think that half of the entire country is being fooled, while the other half is seeing the truth.” In actuality, one third are being fooled, one third see the truthc, and one third choose not to participate for whatever reason.
No, the one third who participate are the ones who take an interest in the process and are less likely to be “fooled”.
How many more ways can you rationalize?
Sam Stone wrote:
Um, because Republican Sonny Perdue wrapped himself in the Confederate flag?
Barnes had the political courage to do the right thing and change the flag, knowing it might cost him at the polls. It did.
Barnes had the political courage to do the right thing and reform Georgia’s education system to make it easier to fire bad teachers. He knew this might cost him at the polls, and it did. The teachers’ union actively fought him.
Those are the two issues that cost Barnes re-election. Not exactly the stuff of a Republican mandate.
By the way, the Republican embrace of the Confederate flag really gives the lie to (nay, makes laughable) this line from december’s OP:
Nicely done, GOP.
I’m not trying to rationalize anything. I’m pointing out that there’s a whole segment of the population that is greater in size (and potential influence on the outcomes of elections) that is not being heard from. That they are so: disaffected, lazy, ignorant, happy with the status quo, or whatever is the variable in the equation that hasn’t been accounted for.
The pendulum swings both ways, and always has. A party that gains dominance also gains accountability for its actions, and when enough people get mad at them, they get voted out. The world keeps changing.
Now the national GOP has to attempt to govern with a razor-thin margin, depending on cajoling and compromise, while not being able to cast blame on the Dems and the beast Clinton for anything anymore. Be careful what you wish for.
Here are some examples:
Window dressing.
The GOP showed its true colors in Georgia.
Bush showed his in the South Carolina primary, too.
december, do you know what “patronization” means?
Looking just at the original post, I would say that if the Republicans can deliver on their promises/obligations, that they are in that position, and have been since Reagan’s first term. Clinton was a conservative democrat, and liberals have been pretty much locked out of the federal government since LBJ. As a recent television ad for salon magazine pointed out, all 9 major news outlets in this country are corporate owned, and that reduces the number of acceptable viewpoints substantially. If a party stays in the corporate safe zone of programs, it will have the vast majority of the media favorable to it and hostile to other parties.
But I would caution the Republicans: they have promised bin Ladin’s head on a platter. They have until Nov 2004 to deliver. There is also an implicit promise of a good economy. If they cannot deliver that, any democrat who is smart enough to pound those two issues, and I mean any democrat, will win.
If your point is that the Republican black outreach effort has been unsuccessful, I agree. My point was that they have been making an effort.
As far as “patronization” goes, I think just about all special interest politics deserves that name. E.g., I grew up in NYC were we Jews were expected to vote for some politician because s/he ate a knish 
There’s a lot of debate among conservatives over what Republicans outreach ought to be. E.g., Thomas Sowell had a recent column on the subject.