Yes if only us working stiffs would just roll over and do what our Ivy League (legacy admissions most of the time) elites tell us what to do – this nation and world would be far better off. Nothing like being lectured to by the horse faced Senator from Massachusetts who has never worked in private industry or had to make a payroll and married two wealthy women, or the goofy, senile 39th president who gave us malaise and stagflation, or the affirmative action fellow who in some perverse way was able to con the nation into voting for him in November 2008, or the Botox injected Speaker of the House from the People’s Republic of San Francisco, or the raging alcoholic who hosts a show on MSNBC called “Hardball”, or the clipped Oxonian accent of an Islamic sympathizer (Christiane Amanpour) who thinks that Obama has accomplished “amazing things” legislatively. Never forget that our elites – all graduates with Law or Business degrees from Yale, Columbia, Harvard, Princeton and Wharton – helped bring down Wall Street.
by Victor Davis Hanson
The bookish, twice-unsuccessful Democratic presidential candidate Adlai Stevenson once sighed that if most thinking people supported him, it still wouldn’t be enough in America because, “I need a majority.”
For some reason, Democrats have chosen to follow the disastrous model of Stevenson and not that of feisty man-of-the-people Missourian Harry Truman — though the former nearly wrecked the party and the latter got elected.
Former President Jimmy Carter likewise seems to feel that he’s still too smart for us. Carter, who turns 86 on Friday, is hitting the news shows to explain why he remains America’s “superior” ex-president — and why more than 30 years ago he was so successful yet so underappreciated as our chief executive.
Most Americans instead remember a very different President Carter who finished his single term with 18 percent inflation, 18 percent interest rates, 11 percent unemployment, long gas lines, and a world in chaos from hostage-taking in Teheran and Soviet communist aggression in Afghanistan and Central America.
Now, John Kerry — who failed to win the presidency in 2004 and recently tried to avoid state sales taxes on his new $7 million yacht — is voicing similar frustrations about Americans’ inability to fathom what their betters are trying to do for them. He is furious that an unsophisticated electorate might not return congressional Democratic majorities in 2010. Kerry laments that, “We have an electorate that doesn’t always pay that much attention to what’s going on.” Instead it falls for “a simple slogan rather than the facts or the truth or what’s happening.”
[…]
That sense of intellectual superiority was channeled by Barack Obama himself when he later tried to explain why his message was not resonating with less astute rural Pennsylvanians: “And it’s not surprising then they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy toward people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.”
During the recent Ground Zero mosque controversy, Obama returned to that Carter-Kerry-Obama sort of condescension. When asked about the overwhelming opposition to the mosque, the president felt again that the unthinking hoi polloi had given into their unfounded fears: “I think that at a time when the country is anxious generally and going through a tough time, then fears can surface, suspicions, divisions can surface in a society.”
The president often clears his throat with “Let me be perfectly clear” and “Make no mistake about it” — as if we, his schoolchildren, have to be warned to pay attention to the all-knowing teacher at the front of the class.
Disappointed progressive pundits also resonate this angst over having to deal with childlike Americans. Washington Post columnist Eugene Robinson recently psychoanalyzed the falling support for the president by claiming that “The American people are acting like a bunch of spoiled brats.”
Read the rest here: American’s still cling to ignorance
Tags: Victor Davis Hanson
