In today's WaPo, Michael Gerson twists a quote from Barack Obama to make it sound like he calle people stupid:
"Part of the reason that our politics seems so tough right now," he recently told a group of Democratic donors in Massachusetts, "and facts and science and argument [do] not seem to be winning the day all the time is because we're hard-wired not to always think clearly when we're scared. And the country is scared."
... It is ironic that the great defender of "science" should be in the thrall of pseudoscience. Human beings under stress are not hard-wired for stupidity,
Barack Obama did not say people under stress are stupid; he said that their thinking is unclear.
This spin shows a Republican argument I've seen before: that nothing stands between raw brainpower and right decisions. Therefore, any argument that people aren't right is twisted to mean that opponents are stupid.
Late in the 1988 campaign, Irving Kristol, one of the founders of neoconservativism, tried to defend then-Vice President George Aitch Bush from the charges of negative campaigning, including the charge that he was questioning Gov. Michael Dukakis's patriotism; by saying the critics were attacking the people's intelligence. Kristol argued that Dukakis was losing because people were legitimately worried by issues that Bush raised, and that to say Bush ran a negative campaign meant that the people couldn' sort out the real issues from the fake. Therefore, Kristol held that it insulted the voters to think that ads which swayed them were not legitimate criticisms of Dukakis.
Kristol had no actual data that the people who responded to the ads had properly thought through the details, he simply argued that nothing can stand between raw brainpower and right decisions. By that logic, anyone who says that the people made the wrong decision was saying that the people are stupid.
I can't say if Kristol impressed anyone, but Bush won; and now Gerson is repeating the tactic.
By equating Obama's quote that scared people often don't think clearly with something that Obama did not say, that the people are stupid, Gerson wants to demagogue the 2010 election.
I can say that even Einstein could be deceived. It doesn't hurt my argument to say that for all the intelligence people have, logic does not come naturally. Intelligence Quotients, in my opinion, are like a budget: a person of average intelligence can buy 100 concepts and a smart person 160; but there is no accounting for taste. I have no problem dealing with a smart person--even a brilliant person--falling for the Tea Party misdirection.
If Michael Gerson wants to say that either the Tea Party is the right answer or the people are stupid; he should take the responsibility of faulting the American intellectual capacity, for there is nothing in Tea Party rhetoric that proves that raw brainpower would uncover bogosity that many did buy.