Seeking a slogan to satisfy
Stupid
By Wesley Pruden
PrudenPolitics.com
Bill Clinton was elected president on a simple
slogan: “It’s the economy, Stupid.” The message was
posted on the wall in the campaign headquarters in
Little Rock. No one was allowed to be stupid enough
to question or forget what the campaign was about.
The rest is history.
Barack Obama and his wise men are still casting
about for a winning theme for 2012. The best anyone
has come up with is, “It’s NOT about the economy,
Stupid.”
But who would buy that?
Obama and his circle are searching for a winning
slogan like Bill Clinton’s “It’s the economy,
stupid”.
So to win, the Democrats must paint those who
disagree with the president as racists. This worked
in ‘08. Eager to demonstrate how far the nation had
come from the bad old days of separate but equal, of
fire hoses, snarling police dogs and church
bombings, millions of Americans embraced Barack
Obama and the opportunity to install a black man in
the White House. Never before had a nation so turned
itself inside out to make amends to an abused
minority, and how better for Americans to celebrate
reform and redemption than to elect a black
president. The accompanying message, made loud and
clear by implication and plain speech, was that a
vote for anyone but Barack Obama was a vote for
bigotry. The “community activist” who had served
only an undistinguished half of a Senate term was a
candidate of no particular qualification, but no one
was allowed to say so.
Al Gore, the grown-up little boy still crying
“wolf,” has extended the accusation to global
warming, the evil greater than all others. One day,
Al says, skeptics of global warming “science” will
be regarded in the way nice people regard
unrepentant racists today. Al even remembers himself
as a civil-rights hero; Martin Luther King hogged
some of the glory that rightly belongs to Al.
“There came a time when friends or people you work
with, or people you were in clubs with . . . when
racist comments would come up in the conversation
and in years past they were just natural,” Al
recalled the other day to an interviewer for
something called UStream. “Then there came a time
when people [like Al] would say, ‘hey, man, why do
you talk that way? I mean that is wrong. I don’t go
for that so don’t talk that way around me. I just
don’t believe that.’ That happened in millions of
conversations and slowly the conversation was won.
We have to win the conversation on climate.”
Heroic stuff for sure, but you have to wonder how Al
found time to win millions of conversations with his
racist pals while thinking about one day inventing
the Internet.
Wit like Al’s is where you find it, of course, and
when a gaggle of professors gathers there’s so much
humor, nimble banter, scintillation, clever
repartee, and intellectual horseplay hanging in the
air with insights and perceptions that the descent
into buffoonery is inevitable. The American
Political Science Association gathered in Seattle
over the weekend and you could have papered a barn
with the learned conclusion that in every Tea Party
voter there’s a racist struggling to escape.
The professors have been writing about an
11-month-old voter survey, The Washington Times’
Steve Dinan reported, and they showed up to read
learned papers no one else would. One professor at
the University of California at San Diego conceded
there’s nothing “intrinsically racist” about
opposing liberal schemes like global warming or
ObamaCare, but he said the Tea Party movement
nevertheless appeals mostly to racists. A professor
at Emory University says such Republicans, who are
likely to be older, wealthier and evangelical
Christians, think blacks could overcome prejudice if
they work harder in the example of Irish, Italian
and Jewish immigrants. Tea Party voters, the
professor concludes in what he calls a “multivariate
analysis,” display “racial resentment” and hold
“negative opinions” about President Obama. (Who but
a racist would do that?)
A graduate student at UCLA observed that Tea Party
voters think capitalism is a good idea and that
explains why, as hard to believe as it may be, such
voters think success is the reward of hard work.
Tempting it may be, but the president and his party
should be wary of finding comfort and inspiration in
the work of professors who mistake the opinion of
their peers for the opinion of the public. One
professor of “variables” even concluded that “we
failed to find any systematic evidence that the Tea
Party was responsible for the Republican success in
2010.” Such political insight explains only why the
professor is a professor.
Wesley Pruden is editor emeritus of The
Washington Times.