Here’s a thought regarding tomorrow’s voting, from Samuel Adams
(1722-1803), a leader in the movements that became the Boston Tea
Party and the American Revolution, a signer of the Declaration of
Independence, and the governor of Massachusetts from 1793 to
1797.
“If ever a time should come,” wrote Adams, “when vain and
aspiring men shall possess the highest seats in Government, our
country will stand in need of its experienced patriots to prevent
its ruin.”
“Vain” in the highest seats isn’t hard to find.
President Obama said the public is at fault if Democrats
don’t do well in tomorrow’s election. Rather than blame himself and
his Congressional allies for ramming through unpopular health care
legislation and delivering unprecedented levels of red ink, Obama
asserted that the voters aren’t thinking straight because they’re
too scared — scared stupid, frightened into a lack of
clarity.
“Part of the reason that our politics seems so tough right
now and facts and science and argument do not seem to be winning
the day all the time,” said Obama, “is because we’re hardwired not
to always think clearly when we’re scared — and the country’s
scared.”
That’s not unlike how candidate Obama described people in
“small towns in Pennsylvania” to a private gathering of his
well-heeled supporters at a 2008 fundraising affair in San
Francisco.
For people in Pennsylvania’s towns where “jobs have been
gone now for 25 years and nothing’s replaced them,” said Obama,
“it’s not surprising then they get bitter, they cling to guns or
religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or
anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to
explain their frustrations.”
It’s a condescending portrayal of working class culture,
characterized as xenophobic and insular by Obama to his much
wealthier and self-assured audience. Too embittered to think
straight, small town Pennsylvanians are stereotyped as loading up
on guns, clinging to Jesus, and irrationally targeting Mexican
illegals, Chinese imports, and any atypical characters who might
somehow show up in their ramshackle towns.
Another instance of “vain” in the high seats came from
Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass., regarding his party’s expected losses in
tomorrow’s election: “We have an electorate that doesn’t always pay
that much attention to what’s going on, so people are influenced by
a simple slogan rather than the facts or the truth or what’s
happening.”
More than describing today, I’d say that Sen. Kerry
inadvertently delivered the perfect account of the 2008 election,
an electorate buying the simple slogans of “Hope,” “Change” and
“Yes we can.”
In this Obama and Kerry scenario, the people are the
problem, not the politicians. We’re either scared dumb or not
paying attention, like dumb kids nodding off in the back of the
classroom.
Or we’re racist. With the tea party likely to have some
winners tomorrow, the NAACP has released “Tea Party Nationalism”
and passed a resolution condemning “racist elements and activities”
in the tea party and issued a report that accuses the tea party
movement of providing “a platform to anti-Semites, racists and
bigots.”
Or we’re being manipulated by sacks of foreign money,
surreptitiously dropped at the Chamber of Commerce in order to pay
for anti-Democrat campaign ads.
So we’re either nuts, terrified, inattentive, bigoted or
just puppets who are being manipulated from overseas — or all
five. And also the undeserving beneficiaries of colonial
plunder.
It’s a fairytale from the “vain” in the “highest seats in
government,” as Adams warned, a story in which the politicians
define themselves as fine and the public is portrayed as in need of
psychotherapy.
