With all apologies to PT Barnum, no one even went broke underestimating the American public. And no one ever got elected President overestimating them.
Nominating a candidate who doesn’t reflect the core values of your base and suppressing your own vote doesn’t help much, either.
Nail —> Head
Hard to say it more succinctly than that, really.
The Republicans are terrible at communicating. They do assume everyone knows what they are saying when they say nothing. And when they do speak, it’s with the wrong emphasis and weak words. They don’t know how to repeat.. to drum it in... or to convince.
Let me add another Mencken quote:
“Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard.
—H. L. Mencken
“They gave the American people credit for being smart enough to know better. Millions are and do — but, unfortunately, more millions aren’t and don’t”
Exactly.... in the future politics will be a marketing game... issues and performance may impact 1/2 of the electorate the other half is pure puff. This election should have been a walk... but millions of voters never ever listen to the news - they listen to Vanity Fair, The View and Oprah.
See if conservatives learn.... (we won’t like it)
Tea Party is NO government mandates/taxation without representation. It is not that difficult of a message to express. But no Romney got neutered and spayed because of his wealth accumulation getting taxed at a capital gains congress created tax rate.
Yup. Next time I’m watching O’Reilly and he sends Jesse Watters to to see how many people think Joe Biden got elected because he’s black, I’ll remember Mencken’s words.
I’ve been thinking the same, as all the prognosticators discuss the election with deep theories about what happened. What happened is too many dumb people believed all that stuff. And as the saying goes, he who controls the information controls the perception. The media was happy to spread the Obama message. In 2016 conservatives should find some pop culture figure to run. It doesn’t seem to matter how qualified a candidate might be.
Well how about all those Republicans who seemed sure that Romney was going to win big and who shopped around for polls and radio stations to tell them what they wanted to hear.
Shoving your head in the sand to avoid reality will never win an election. That is hardly ‘smart’.
Romney was a crappy candidate, and lots of others like Akin gave him help losing.
If this is really a ‘wake-up’ call then is the new plan just to give up?
Wasn’t it Mencken who referred to our political system as a “boobocracy?”
Never underestimate the stupidity of the American people.
What do you think is the aim of decades of public education? To make for a smart voting population?
We assumed they were paying attention to reality.
Yes, the American population collectively is getting dumber with the passage of time. Just look at the trajectory of SAT scores over the last 50 years. SAT test takers now "graduate" into the general voting public after years of politically correct "education" where the basic facts and patterns of American history and government are de-emphasized in favor of feel good mythology. And if that isn't enough, the average intelligence of the American voter is declining (of course, we can't really verify it because routine IQ tests are pretty much of a taboo) largely because the higher intelligence parents tend to have fewer children than their lower intelligence cohorts.
Then, too, modern day immigrants tend be less intelligent than newcomers of previous generations because they are attracted to the country less by economic opportunity than government goodies. That's another factor driving average intelligence of the American population in a downward direction. We are dumber on average as a society now than at the time Mencken and Barnum made their now-famous quotes.
Despite the fact that all of these factors and those discussed in the posted article are true, the 'Rats still would not have had the success to the degree that they had in this election had they not engaged in massive fraud and cheating in a wide variety of aspects of the election process, most notably in strategically selected counties and districts in the swing states. It's not surprising that such a massive loss of integrity in the electoral process is facilitated by a dumbed-down electorate which in too many cases was never taught the fundamental importance of that integrity to the functioning of a free republican government and society.
Democrats know that most are stupid.
What is happening to this country is what de Tocqueville and other wise men warned us about.
Here’s an example:
The Dems took the phrase “self-deportation” to be a terrifying aspect of Romney’s immigration policy. Why? They just ignored the prefix, “self-,” and focused only on the root, “deportation.”
What grade is it again where we learn about prefixes and how they modify the root of the word?
“But ‘deportation’ is a scary word!” Not knowing how to read the English language is possibly a tad scarier.