Proudly Stupid

So, Senator Obama spoke to the country about race, his pastor and the need to move ahead.  As John Stewart described it, Senator Obama decided on a novel approach and acted as if his audience were adults.  I hope that was not too optimistic.

The effect of so many years of decline in our educational system has resulted in a nation of sheep; of people who can actually conclude, for instance, that George W. Bush is more qualified than, first, John McCain, then Al Gore, then John Kerry, perhaps because he is said to be more likable or perhaps because they are easily distracted into believing that, for instance, a candidate's view on whether gay people should marry is more important than whether they understand the complex world we live in.

I posted much the same thing a few weeks ago and was told that I should not blame "the audience" and that our candidates were the problem.  Aside from confusing the worth of an entertainer with that of a political leader (which, of course, is a rampant misconception), this view truly transposes reality.  The problem has not been our candidates: Vice President Gore and Senator Kerry were so obviously more qualified for the presidency that the person who wound up in the job (as was Senator McCain) that it is absurd to argue otherwise.  And, mourn Ronald Reagan if you wish, but both Walter Mondale and even President Carter were qualified for the presidency and were beaten by someone who is not.  That this can be seriously debated actually proves my point.

Any number of books have made this case more eloquently than I have:  the most recent of them by Susan Jacoby (this NY Times article about her book, and the stunning Pearl Harbor story, say all that needs to be said) but there are several other great ones: by Frank Rich, Paul Krugman, the  fairly dense What's the Matter with Kansas and the original Hofstadter book.

I have often made reference to the episode on The West Wing which captured the incredible nature of a campaign between an obviously qualified candidate and one who does not have the rudimentary knowledge of the world and its problems required of the average tenth grader when Josh and Toby discussed just how ridiculous and horrible this was. (The extensive quote is, however, part of this postfrom my own blog a year or so ago).

The issue is not who the best speaker is, or the nicest candidate or the one who you would want to have a beer with, or even whose campaign is the best organized.  The issue is who can best serve as president, based on what they have done so far and what opinions they hold about what challenges we face as we go forward. (Either candidate for the Democratic Party nomination is fine with me: I prefer Senator Obama, for reasons posted here, but Senator Clinton would be fine with me, too).

We are facing an economic meltdown that any fool could see coming, so long as the country kept spending money without raising taxes.  We are at war with a country that did not attack us, and was not a serious threat, while ignoring both the descent of Afghanistan into a medieval terror, and the increasingly powerful forces there dedicated to killing as many people with whom they disagree as possible.  We are funding the people who are killing us by an addiction to a fossil fuel that more than likely is choking our planet into oblivion and, in the meantime, to an increase in natural disasters and doing next to nothing to deal with any of these problems and myriad others caused by a popular will shaped by the rankest of ignorance: an ignorance we happily wallow in and extol as if it were a virtue and intelligence (or, God forbid, intellectualism) a vice.

When President Reagan says that the "Government is not the solution to our problem. Government is the problem" or George H.W. Bush promises, politically fatally, as it turned out, that he will veto any raise in taxes, and gains universal acclaim with no challenge, it appears beyond the capacity of the public or press to understand the relationship between these statements and bridges collapsing in Minnesota, FEMA being powerless to significantly assist people in need after natural disasters, an inability of government to check the excesses of private entities jeopardizing the nation’s financial security so as to make a few more bucks.

Government is not always the solution to our problems, but it is, when in the hands of those who understand its mission, our collective way to control the desires of a few to put their interests above us as a whole.  

As Krugman wrote yesterday, The Great Depression forced Americans to set aside some of the Know Nothing-ism and foolish biases and elect a man who was allowed to reshape a country in the gravest distress it had ever been.  As he acted and since, however, the New Deal of our greatest president, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, have been under attack by the forces of, to use a current locution, evil: those who place their interests above the rest of us.  They use slogans and propaganda to hide what they are doing, but just as anybody knows that the 20 clowns who get out of the little car at the circus is nothing more than a clever trick, the devices used to fool the American people should be  transparent to anybody with more a fifth grade education.

That’s the problem.