(I found this article by Crowther to be well worth the read!) gd
Four months ago, as the general public was getting its first taste of Mitt Romney and Rudy Giuliani, we beheld a rare congruence where the most liberal and least liberal New York Times columnists offered essentially the same impression, during the same 24-hour news cycle.
“To be a serious presidential contender, after all, you have to be a fairly smart guy,” wrote the liberal economist Paul Krugman, “and nobody has accused either Mr. Romney or Mr. Giuliani of being stupid. To appeal to the GOP base, however, you have to say some very stupid things, like Mr. Romney’s declaration that we should ‘double Guantanamo …’”
The next morning, at the bottom of the same op-ed page, after boasting that Romney graduated in the top 5% of his class at Harvard Business School, the conservative David Brooks asked us, “Why do the Democratic candidates pretend to be smarter than they really are, while the Republicans pretend to be dumber?”
To answer Brooks as if he didn’t know is condescending, so we assume his question is rhetorical. But “the media” have become a bubble where the people inside don’t always grasp what is obvious to everyone outside. What Brooks probably knows, he will never write — that Democrats pretend to be as smart as they can because they think many of their target voters are intelligent and discriminating, while Republicans pretend to be as dumb as they can because they think most of their base is even dumber. (The smart ones, they think, understand that the candidates are just whoring themselves to snare the slack-jaws.) This humorously sorry state of the party, the wages of four decades of cynical success, was pulled into focus by a Times headline from the Republican primary camps in New Hampshire: “Candidates Spar Over Who Is a Real Republican.”
http://www.populist.com/08.02.crowther.html
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