Makes one go....Hmmmmmmmmmmmm?

 Stolen from Camp of The Saints. Read it. By James Bowman.

How to explain such pluperfect block-headedness? Even if he really believes anything so preposterous — as many in his prime constituency of academia no doubt do believe it — why would he say it publicly and so reinforce the impression he already gives of being haughty and superior, vain of his reputation for intelligence and out of touch with the feelings of ordinary people? Can he not see how condescending comments like this are?
I think the answer must be, no he can’t. But the problem is not unique to him. It seems to be something in the DNA of the post-Vietnam Democratic Party. Cast your mind back to the Democratic presidents and candidates for president — the fact that there are many more of the latter than the former is not insignificant — of the last 40 years and you observe a remarkable pattern. All of them, with the exception of Bill Clinton — who is also not insignificantly the most electorally successful of them — were guilty of the same kind of intellectual snobbery. All of them welcomed and cultivated a reputation for being intellectuals themselves and for associating with intellectuals and technocrats — people, that is, who were supposed to know better what was good for us than we knew ourselves. President Clinton did too but, alone among his party’s standard-bearers, he managed to keep the eggheads at arms length, at least most of the time. There were a few slips, but he rarely allowed people, including people he disagreed with, to feel that he thought himself smarter than they were, even if he did.
But just look at the others: George McGovern, leading his anti-war students and professors and his hippie cohorts to a crushing defeat; Jimmy Carter the “nuclear engineer” who concerned himself with allocating time on the White House tennis court and thought that the American people who had grown disenchanted with him must be suffering from a malaise; Walter Mondale with his contempt for Reagan’s intelligence; Michael Dukakis with his ostentatious wonkery and apparent inability to feel anything about the speculative rape and murder of his wife; Al Gore with his deep sighs and the slow-speaking manner of a first grade teacher and, finally, the haughty, French-looking John Kerry who made the mistake of believing his own propaganda about President Bush’s stupidity — all were precursors of the Obama style and the Obama blindness to how unattractively that air of superiority comes across to the average voter. And the only one of them ever to be elected president wore his religion on his sleeve like Glenn Beck!