Misunderestimating may cost you
Frank Wilson
The Inquirer's books editor
Democrats searching for reasons why a majority of the electorate voted against their presidential candidate might want to resist their predilection for nuance and consider instead certain fundamental rules of combat.
Rule No. 1. Never underestimate your opponent.
Before this year's election, George W. Bush had stood for elective office four times. He won three times. In his first campaign for governor of Texas, Bush was a long shot against a tough, well-financed incumbent. He won narrowly. But when he ran for reelection, he won handily.
In his first White House bid, Bush was the underdog against the vice president of an incumbent who had presided over eight years of peace and considerable prosperity. Bush won - barely. But win he did.
Rule No. 2.Never underestimate your opponent's intelligence. Why? Well, there are a number of reasons, but the principal one is that there is a corollary to such, namely, an overestimation of your own, which, in turn, leads to a woeful lack of necessary self-criticism and its own corollaries, smugness and self-satisfaction.
Donna Brazile, Al Gore's campaign manager, made this point in an open letter she wrote in August. Commenting on bumper stickers declaring that "Somewhere in Texas, a village is missing its idiot," Brazile warned that "if the bumper-sticker crowd believes it refers to George W. Bush, they are sorely mistaken." Sen. John Kerry, she said, "is running against a shrewd, clever and an extremely intelligent opponent."
Rule No. 3. Never underestimate the intelligence of your opponent's supporters, either. Whatever else one can say about Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Condoleezza Rice, Paul Wolfowitz, William Kristol, William F. Buckley Jr., Bill Bennett, et al., whoever entertains the notion that they're stupid needs a reality check.
Of course, they're not the Bush supporters against whom the stupidity accusation is made. It's the tens of millions of ordinary citizens who voted for the President who were thought of as stupid. Which is why novelist Jane Smiley, writing in Slate last week, decided to be "honest about our antagonists." Smart Republicans such as Cheney and Rumsfeld, she opined, "are predatory and resentful, amoral, avaricious, and arrogant. Lots of Americans like and admire them because lots of Americans, even those who don't share those same qualities, don't know which end is up." As Smiley sees it, "the error that progressives have consistently committed over the years is to underestimate the vitality of ignorance in America. Listen to what the red state citizens say about themselves, the songs they write, and the sermons they flock to. They know who they are - they are full of original sin and they have a taste for violence." The upshot is "that red state types, above all, do not want to be told what to do - they prefer to be ignorant. As a result, they are virtually unteachable."
This is a view shared by more "progressives" than one might think. Smiley has obviously been reading Thomas Frank's What's the Matter With Kansas?: How Conservatives Won the Heart of America. In his book, Frank distinguishes between "the true believers, the average folks who have been driven into right-wing politics by what they see as the tyranny of the lawyers, the America-haters at Harvard, the professional politicians in Washington or the eviction of God from public space," and "the opportunists: professional politicians and lawyers and Harvard men who have discovered in the great right-wing groundswell an easy shortcut to realizing their ambitions."
It should be obvious what the problem is if you are ever to win an election in a democracy when you think the other party is a crowd of buffoons in thrall to a cabal of blackguards. To begin with, it means that your campaign discourse must be designed not to persuade voters, but to deceive them. Worse, it precludes your ever examining your opponents' premises, arguments and conclusions in good faith - in other words, not just to refute them, but to see whether there's anything to them. It also precludes ever examining your own views in order to see whether they stand in any need of correction.
In short, it means not doing what smart people are supposed to be good at.
philly.com
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