The "Audacity of Dope" becomes the force that drives the GOP turnaround
Boxed In: For Obama, the Congress under GOP control = intensified gridlock.
After George W. Bush completed his first term in his court-appointed job as President of the United States, the London Daily Times attached a flamboyant headline to a front page story about what it apparently viewed as a logic-defying 2004 re-election victory by Bush over his more cerebral opponent, John Kerry. It read something along the lines of: How Can 59 Million People be so Dumb ? Well, upon analyzing the outcome of our mid-term elections, perhaps this time the headline will read: Oops, she did it again!
For sure, the logic behind re-electing Bush in 2004 had all the scholarly value of a Britney Spears tune. But in reality, that outcome shouldn't have been shocking to the Brits then, nor should the results of these mid-terms be of much surprise to them today. If anything, both outcomes combine for a coarse doubling down of the maxim that in America, it's almost impossible for rationality, reasoning, or just plain old common sense to win a political battle against raw emotion. It is a decadent, win-at-all-cost, anything goes blood sport that masquerades as politics here in this country. In such an intensively piquant arena, rarely in the eyes of the American electorate, is erudition viewed as a weapon of any consequence.
Hence, what was again demonstrated -- through the voters' foolhardy embrace of the proponents of an, in some cases, neo-medievalist political agenda that essentially runs counter to the interests of those same voters -- is that the GOP's awareness that emotion dominates intellect can work miracles if properly channeled. It is this awareness which accounts for the strident promotion of regressive anti-intellectualism that's such a key part of the GOP political handbook. And the latest miracle it produced, of course, would be the Party's political resurrection during these mid-terms.
The Republicans own that portion of the nation's electorate which forms the political fodder that progressive MSNBC commentator Ed Schulz likes to describe as "low-information" voters. Indeed, some critics have pointed out that the perception of this group is that liberals talk down to them. As the University of Virginia's Gerald Alexander, a political professor, asserted early this year in a Washington Post op-ed piece titled: Why are Liberals so Condescending? : "This condescension is part of a liberal tradition that for generations has impoverished American debates over the economy, society and the functions of government and threatens to do so again today, when dialogue would be more valuable than ever."
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