CSotD: Risky strategizing
Skip to comments
I like Pat Oliphant's cartoon. He manages to portray Gingrich as both the Pharisee in the temple and the man praying on the street corner, which isn't a hard combo, since they are both people who would rather be thought of as religious than actually embrace the values of religion.
On the other hand, Matthew quotes Jesus as saying that the man praying on the street corner gets his reward on earth, while God rewards the man who prays in private in a more profound, eternal way.
Gingrich, let us not forget, is in fact angling for an earthly reward, the kind that hypocrites and showoffs can get by praying on street corners.
Which brings us to the actual point of Oliphant's cartoon — the suddenly popular idea that, if Gingrich wins the nomination, Obama wins the White House, a concept that is being accepted as absolute. And Oliphant lays it out here: Gingrich is so egotistical and potentially divisive that he will alienate voters and Obama will get in by default.
In a world in which "Dancing with the Stars" and "Two and a Half Men" are top rated shows and people really are Keeping up with the Kardashians, in a world that has taken Sarah Palin seriously, in a world in which people think sharing pictures on Facebook will garner some kid a free heart transplant, how much are you willing to wager on the intelligence of the American people?
On "This Week," Paul Krugman recently remarked of Gingrich, "somebody said he's a stupid man's idea of what a smart person sounds like," and, while I suspect that the somebody who came up with that perceptive wisecrack has a beard and a Nobel in economics, there are two far more critical points here:
One is that Krugman's entire comment was "The Republican base does not want Romney, and they keep on looking for an alternative, and Newt, although somebody said he's a stupid man's idea of what a smart person sounds like … is more plausible than the other guys that they've been pushing up."
In other words, Krugman may have dissed him as a phony intellectual, but he wasn't saying that he couldn't win, which brings us to the second point:
Point Two is that Gingrich sounds like a stupid man's idea of what a smart person whom he likes sounds like.
By contrast, John Kerry, Al Gore and Howard Dean sound like a stupid man's idea of what a smart person sounds like whom he would take behind the bus garage after school and beat the crap out of.
I think a lot of commentators are missing this point.
I remember when "Okie from Muskogee" was a hit and I was just getting out of college. One of the lines was "kids here still respect the college dean," and we laughed over it because most of us barely knew the college dean.
Granted, that may have been because our particular college president had a famously open door on his office, but the college dean was, while a nice chap, primarily a paper shuffler. The faculty dealt with him regularly, but the only time I ever spoke to him, it was a five minute conversation to get out of a lingering phys ed requirement that popped back up my senior year.
It wasn't that I didn't respect the college dean. I didn't feel about him one way or the other, and Merle Haggard was apparently drawing on movies from the 1940s in which the college dean was some wise, benevolent father figure who appeared at the Big Bon Fire to remind the kids to study hard, enjoy the game and polish their saddle shoes.
That is the kind of smart person whom stupid men think Newt Gingrich sounds like, and I'm not sure I'd want to be in an election running against Charlie Ruggles or Clifton Webb.
Not when the stupid men (and, of course, women) have already shown their willingness to believe the Swift Boat Veteran's accusations, and to chuckle over all the ridiculous things that Al Gore never said.
Not do I believe that the media would yank Gingrich's pants down around his ankles as soon as he said something that didn't add up. Although Fox News has become more responsible in the past few weeks, there are still a lot of commentators out there who would rather make a splash than make a point, and who would rather get a laugh than get it right.
I mean, good lord, I actually saw a Teleprompter gag the other day in a cartoon by a reputable, relatively non-partisan political cartoonist.
We have met the stupid man, and he is us.
Comments 4
Comments are closed.