Why Don't Americans Want Smart People Governing Them?

[remember2000forever]

Al Gore was considered "Boring".

Kerry was "Too High Brow".

Our Successes:

Clinton was, and is, a very smart man, but he dumbed it down, talked "Folksy" and was victorius.

Carter, another smart man, came off "Warm and a People Type of Guy"

We all know that Obama and Biden are brilliant!!!!!!

Do we have another problem here with the "Sheeple"?

[no_hypocrisy]

1. I'm really beginning to think "Americans" vote for people who remind

them of themselves. And not a majority of voters have had uniform educational benefits that promote critical thinking. They distrust others who can "out-think" them.

I wish I were wrong.

[Mumble]

Easy...the masses are unwashed and dumb.

[OneGrassRoot]

2. Right or wrong, it's about being "conversational" in conveying the points...

I think Obama is better at this than Gore and Kerry, but we're still faced with a populace that doesn't understand that not everything has a clearcut, black-or-white answer. There are shades of gray in this complex world, and that's difficult to put into a soundbite, conversational tone or not.

[wilt the stilt]

3. lots of people hate

smart people. There is a rampant anti intellectualism in this country. They feel smart people look down on them.

[YDogg]

5. ding, ding, ding! we have a winner.

[codjh9]

14. Yes. My dad was a political science professor, and he talked about the anti-intellectual

bias in this country. But they love it when scientists come up with new technological crap for them to play with, don't they? They just don't like those smart people every telling us what to DO - ever! - even if it makes sense.

[bdamomma]

19. the key word is HATE

[MotorCityMan]

21. True. Some people don't like people smarter than them

I knew that back in jr. high school. I was fortunate in that I did well in school and usually got As and Bs. I will never forget this girl in my 7th grade class telling me that she hated me because I had got an A on a test and she got a D. I wasn't bragging or being obnoxious, either. I never was a show off. She asked what grade I got and I told her.

I was 11 at the time and couldn't understand it. I didn't even like this girl, but it bothered me that she would say that.

You would think that most people would appreciate a president who was smarter than them. That does not seem to be the case.

[Scout]

24. unfortunately, a lot of "smart" people DO look down on others...

as witnessed many times by comments on DU (and elsewhere, not just DUers).

:shrug:

[RaleighNCDUer]

27. But when WE do it, it is for good reason.

:evilgrin:

[codjh9]

28. Yeah, but I think that's perceived more often than it's actually true, and I think

more of it is just that some of the public wants a 'regular guy' (or gal) in the office, which is profoundly stupid.

[Johonny]

29. I'll go with this

[Symarip]

4. I think the real question is

Why do Americans constantly stick people into government that want to dismantle government?

[Lorien]

6. People always vote for the person the "like" best

they rarely think about the issues at all. Witness the popularity of Reagan or Clinton. Dole was also "boring" so he never stood a chance either-it wasn't because his policies were crap (which they were), it was because he ran against a much more charismatic candidate.

[SammyWinstonJack]

7. I want the smartest, most progressive people governing us all.

I can have a beer with my friends. :evilgrin:

[bdamomma]

23. exactly.

but this is what the rove mentality instilled in the minds of people. vote GW the guy you can have a beer with, that sort of nonsense.

the whole mentality thing is dragging this country down, that is why our persona is so laughable in other countries that they do call us stupid.

[Klukie]

8. Inferiority complex....

a common attribute of the chest beating types.

[bryant69]

9. I think the problem is succinctly explained in the phrase Sheeple

It's not that they don't like smart people, they don't like people who think they are better than they are. And who does? The Republican Party has hit on a winning strategy; arguing that the Democratic Candidate is a superior arrogant person who thinks he's better than normal folks and frankly doesn't like them that much. It worked in 2000 and in 2004, they are trying it again.

But think about it for a moment, all of you who enjoy using the phrase sheeple, imagine you had a new boss/supervisor/whatever. And he or she called you into the conference room and started by saying "Well I'm glad to see all you sheeple could be herded in here." What would that tell you about your new boss?

Bryant
Check it out --> http:///politicalcomment.blogspot.com

[Fumesucker]

33. The term sheeple gets used about as much on the right as on the left..

Disrespecting American's intelligence is not an exclusive characteristic of the left, they do plenty of that at Frei Republik and other right wing sites too..

[FreakinDJ]

10. If I hire a TV repairman he should know more then me about fixing TVs

Just a simple concept

[liberal N proud]

11. Because they sit in front of their box in the living room

and listen to the talking heads tell them how great McCain and Palin are. And in between are the lying commercials run by the McCain campaign painting a very bad picture.
When the media talks about Obama, they show pictures of McCain or Palin.

People are brainwashed.

[Tutonic]

12. Because smart people like black people tend to tell you like it is.

So Obama has two giant boulders that he has to carry.

[DCKit]

13. "Idiocracy" is a Documentary.

[codjh9]

15. It IS, and it's NOW, not 500 years from now!

[TransitJohn]

18. "Go 'way! 'Batin'!"

:hi:

[Ishoutandscream2]

30. I love Idiocracy, but I kept thinking through the movie

that if "America" is that dumb (notice in the movie they didn't say "United States"), then we would have been taken over by a foreign power long before that. China, anyone?

[annabanana]

16. the "too boring" "too highbrow" crap was 97% media BS!

It was repeated often enough to become "conventional wisdom".. Please bear in mind that it was that kind of crap that promoted the illusion of how "close" the race was... Which made their theft of those two elections possible.

[Romulox]

17. Being smart = / = "has my best interests at heart"

It's bizarre to conflate being smart with being virtuous; there is little relationship between the two. The smartest candidate may have developed the most efficient plan to screw over working people. :hi:

I think, in reality, this thread boils down to: "why won't the underclasses just shut up and do what their betters tell them?" :eyes:

[Kalyke]

20. Because they're afraid that they won't understand what their

leaders are telling them and they're too lazy to go get a dictionary.

People just don't want to face up to the hard issues.

[Princess Turandot]

22. I think the cable network 'news' explosion and talking-head frenzy

is to blame to a large degree. This is a relatively recent phenomena. (See President list below.) While tv coverage affected the races beginning with JFK, its influence increased slowly. And it was largely limited to the old-fashioned national news anchors, who were actually fairly responsible newsmen. People likely picked Huntley-Brinkley vs Cronkite based on their styles, not on their rabid partisanship.

By Clinton's second term, cable tv was expanding greatly and moving in the direction of gotcha sound-bytes, which then made their way to network tv news and print media. The superficial coverage really didn't allow for much in-depth exposure and became mired in back-and-forth punditry, which to the average person was probably close to incomprehensible babble. (Not surprising, because it is.) So, suddenly voters became much more exposed to the presidential candidates, but exposed in a edited bursts with a 'let's keep this a contest' bias. To some degree, if you don't really know all that much about someone, I think people just defaulted to an emotional response to the 'person' or at least the person the media gave them.

But I don't think that all hope is lost, yet. Bush 2 is a moron but he didn't actually beat the very smart Al Gore. You could say that it shouldn't have been close but I don't think most voters knew that much about Gore to begin with. The media fucked him over and Bill's idiocy re: a starstruck immature groupie also did not help him. Plus, he was not a knock your socks off speaker during the campaign.

Bush 2 - 2 had the 'never switch CIC in warfare' thing going for him more than anything else, I think. Kerry's personality was not that ideal for sound-byte exposure but despite that, he received more votes than anyone else in history, except for Bush that year.

Hopefully, the voting public redeems itself and the Bush years turn out to be an outlier. But I don't think that it will ever be easy, this year or in the future, because of the now uber-bloated media's pursuit of their own interests, for which a neck and neck horse-race is much more profitable.


Quite Smart to Very Smart:
FDR
Truman
Eisenhower
Kennedy (First televised debates. Who knows if he would have won w/o that given the bias against Catholics. He outperformed Nixon content-wise but he kicked him off the stage with his charisma and handsome looks, which made you really want to vote for him, on an emotional level.)

LBJ
Nixon (amoral but very smart)

N/A:
Ford (not elected)

Very Smart:
Carter

Reagan - Not so smart but the bastard could deliver a well written speech very effectively. Effectively, he sounded quite smart, unless you saw him giving a press conference, which most people probably did not. Beat the very smart Carter who had a lot of baggage from his term, with an assist from Ayatollah Khomeini.

Bush 1 - Average, IMO. (Dukakis was smarter, although you wouldn't know it from his tank escapade.) Cable began to grow near the end of his term, after the Gulf War coverage. He then loses to:

Next Bill wins: brilliant and charisma on steroids, with an assist from:

Ross Perot: Very Smart albeit quirky and eccentric. Without all the television media exposure Perot got, there's no way he would have gotten so many votes, IMO.

Bill beats Dole for term two, easily.

[ddeclue]

25. Stupid people want to believe that they are capable of being President

so they vote for other stupid people.

Doug D.

[codjh9]

41. Hah! Yep. Same reason some of them aren't for taxing the rich more, because

somewhere in those pinheads they think 'well heck, *I* might be a millionaire someday, and I wouldn't want to be taxed a lot either!'.

[Ishoutandscream2]

26. The 64,000 dollar question

I want the best and brightest, and the folks I work with think that's odd and "elitist." I just don't get it.

[Clcal422]

31. I agree its that people generally get all

there new information from either FIXED news or other media outlets that use all that right wing talking points use it as the truth and aren't bothered to research or look it up anymore
I think that is so sad people don't research information for themselves. :(

[Waiting For Everyman]

32. Rebelling against the sensible thing to do; and jealousy

[tomg]

34. The United States has a very

long history of anti-intellectualism going back at least to pre-Revolution. In fact, I think it probably has to do with our conflicted notions of what constitutes "equality." If all people are "equal" - as opposed to humans having the same rights by dint of their being human - then who are those intellectuals to claim they know more than me. We're "equal."

In addition, the country has always had a kind of frontier mentality that placed a pragmatic, applicable type of intelligence over a more theoretical type of intelligence. These then get bound up in issues of class and of region, and over time we develop a kind of weird Manichean attitude where "intellectual" = elite, out of touch, impractical, Northeastern and urban, cultured ( code for weak), European while "anti-intellectual" = down-to-earth, everyday problems, practical, Heartland and rural, uncultured ( code for strong), American. This is all over American literature, particularly humor, from Ichabod Crane vs. Brom Bones through Twain and Will Rogers.

Al Gore - boring - he is/was mocked as a Professor
Kerry - too high brow - he is European and aaaaaahhhhh - French.
Clinton - He is a Rhodes Scholar, but he plays it out like the old cracker barrel philosopher (just the same kind of common sense any old boy could pick up around the general store)
Carter - same thing, but with the local minister in place of the cracker barrel philosopher.

[VP505]

35. I think plain old simple

laziness has much to do with why so many are willing to let some Politico or TV talking head tell them how, why and what to think. There are plenty of people willing to just take anything said at face value without doing ANY research for facts. The Booo$h Admin has exploited that phenomenon to the max by labeling their policies and Programs with language that taken at face value sounds reasonable, but when looking at the details, not so much. No Child Left behind, Patriot Act, Freedom Agenda, etc.

[dana_b]

36. hmmm... yes and no...

there are some that are lazy and can't be bothered to read (oh no!!). The t.v. is easy. However I do believe that many people are so busy just trying to survive that they really don't have the time or will to do the work that many here do.

[VP505]

44. That certainly is a very real and valid

consideration, with so many having to work two or more jobs and as many hours as they can to make ends meet. Perhaps lazy is not quite the appropriate description, sometimes I forget that not everyone is retired with time to spare.

[Sabriel]

37. I think Get Your War On said it best in 2004:

[dana_b]

38. LOL

wow!! that's a beautiful thing

[Iggo]

39. Why don't stupid people like smart people?

Yeah, I ain't figured that one out yet. But they don't. That's for sure.

[Obamarulz11]

40. Some people are jealous of the intellegent...come as a threat

During my years in High School and College.

Some of my football teammates, didn't like me because I excelled in the classroom (3.5 GPA in Speech Pathology, Political Science minor)which is not your typical jock major. Clearly the fact that I was good on the Football field/or the Baseball Diamond had nothing to do with the jealousy that existed. What really burns them up is when great looking women ask me to tutor them. Remember I was a scholarship athlete, and i'm being asked to tutor!.

It isn't my fault that approximately 50-75 scholarship athletes at my alma mater (SEC conference school) COULD NOT READ!!!!!

Anyway, the point I'm making here is that some people are jealous, are threatened by intelligence in someway. I don't know why?

I often think about our youth's High School class schedule under the two presidents

Obama

Biology
Physics
Probability/Statistics
Calculus I
Community Service I/Language Arts/Foreign Studies
Government:Fed/State/Local
Phys Ed
English


Mc Same

Creationism I
Darwinism I
Religious theories I
Abstinence Sex-Education I

Fuck I give up. DU help me out. Im scared for our youth

[Supersedeas]

42. pure Media manipulation--they know the issues that Americans care about, YET

they feed us best Corporate diversions that the Oil, Gas, and Defense industry can afford to pay for.

[bdamomma]

43. and if people show they are less intelligent it is easier for

government to control them, it is all about controlling the masses and keeping them dumbed down, some Americans are quite willing to do this not thinking for themselves.

government needs to be scared about its citizens not the other way around.