A Country In Shambles Under GOP Rule

There are few things that make political coverage more unbearable — and more distorting — than The David Brooks Syndrome: the extremely patronizing and ill-informed pretense, shared by media and right-wing elites alike, that they can study the Little Common People like zoo animals, and then translate and give voice to their simple-minded and ignorant though good-hearted, salt-of-the-earth perspectives. Rarely has this mentality been so transparent as it has been in the wake of the Biden-Palin debate, as pundits and right-wing polemicists like Brooks, Peggy Noonan and Rich “Starbursts” Lowry rushed forward to proclaim giddily that Regular Americans would love Sarah Palin and this love could even help McCain win, despite — or, really, because of — her vapid, content-free telegenic presence.

Actual empirical evidence — called “polling data” — has almost uniformly demonstrated how false these condescending pats on the head are, as every single poll conducted thus far (at least that I’m aware of) found that Americans believed that Biden won and is the far more serious and knowledgeable candidate, and huge numbers continue to have profound doubts about Palin’s fitness for office. And the first tracking poll to report a full post-debate day of polling — the Research 2000 poll for Daily Kos — finds Obama with a 13-point lead, his largest ever. This joint right-wing/pundit claim that Americans would swoon in the face of Palin’s empty chatter, self-conscious folksiness and chronic, seizure-like winking says much more about those making the claim than it does about their Regular People subjects.

As polling data conclusively demonstrates, the mindset of the voting public is infinitely more rational and substance-based than the pundits and the Right fantasize when they lyrically praise the Regular American — at least it is in this time of perceived (and actual) crisis. What’s happening in this country, and in this election, is rather simple and easy to see: (1) the country is in total shambles — possibly far worse than what people even realize; (2) we have lived for the last eight years under virtually absolute GOP rule; (3) the public knows this; (4) the Republican President and his party are therefore intensely — historically — unpopular; and (5) the voting public doesn’t want to continue living under the rule of the same faction and same political party that has driven the country into the ground. Having Sarah Palin drop her gerund endings and desperately trotting out the standard, tired GOP attack ads to depict Obama as a radical, fist-pumping, America-hating, unhinged socialist — when everyone can see with their own eyes that he isn’t — won’t change any of that.