Could America Go Smart?

Obama can’t bowl. We laugh. Hillary takes a shot and a beer. We laugh harder. It’s America, where Ivy League multi-millionaires play at being regular folks, but usually about as well as George Bush plays President.

Obama can win the city and split the burbs, but Clinton’s got the white working class. It’s macro-analyzed, micro-analyzed and re-analyzed.

But maybe they’re missing the real question: could America go smart?

Could smart become chic, and then waltz right in and displace dumb as the American political paradigm?

One defining characteristic of American politics is the love affair with dumb. It goes way back and way deep. What other country could boast a thriving party called the Know Nothings. That was like two centuries ago (but only one century old when I learned it in civics class). It was anti-immigrant -- some things never change.

It’s not just the right either, though surely a political culture of dumbness plays to the right. Remember, the original crusader for anti-evolutionism – another uniquely American dumbassity – was our greatest populist, William Jennings Bryan. Maybe it’s understandable: poor folks have been called dumb so long they just don’t trust smart.

Ronald Reagan, the most influential President of my long lifetime, could not distinguish the history of WW II from war movies. When he debated Carter, and Carter made a fool of him, he intoned "There you go again," a line that scored a knockout with Americans. Carter was buried in a landslide of dumb.

George Bush portrayed himself as a regular guy, and, incredibly, it worked. Out of 300 million people, I can’t think of one who better personifies being a child of privilege. Yet he successfully portrayed his opponents as elitists (well that wasn’t hard with Kerry, was it?). His country estate became a "ranch." He’s dumb and thus a bona fide regular American.

Bill Clinton, he’s smart. Yale and Oxford. But he played Joe Six-pack in the movie of American politics. Hillary – Radcliffe and Yale – tells us tales of grandpa teaching her to hunt. Hunt what? Cattle futures? She’s playing us for dumb, a tried and true strategy.

In other countries, politicians pretend to be smarter than they are. Must be really weird to be there! Imagine a debate in, say, France, where the French Reagan tries "there you go again" and the other Frenchie says, "Do you really think the French people will buy that crap?"

Once I was at a debate with the Prime Minister of Belize. His opponent was wearing flip-flops. The chairman of Blue Creek village told the Prime Minister his priorities were wrong. They both sounded smart. The nearest high school was a long bus ride away.

When Oscar Arias, or Mandela, or Palme, or Arafat won the Nobel Prize, that enhanced their reputation among their people. But Gore… if he had a chance at a comeback, that Nobel finished him off. There ain’t no bowling alleys in Norway. (Or is it Sweden, those two are too confusing to us Americans.)

Tipping Point?

Then comes along Obama. All this talk about Obamamania, Obamicans, etc, but what strikes me is that he isn’t talking dumb. Why hasn’t that finished him off?

They say he’s so eloquent. But maybe that means he playing smart. And maybe there’s a market for that now. A bigger market than the back seat of an 8-air bag Volvo.

I don’t ever listen to these politicians. I paid my dues to do-goodness and I just don’t have to suffer through that. But after the Obama race speech, a friend told me I had to check it out. So I read it on line. Very different. Not profound, not pungent, nowhere near a King speech. But it was smart. That was the stunner. So I went on line for other Obama speeches, and, sure enough, they were smart, too.

Then I started thinking about working people I know, and how many of them want smart leaders. Maybe there is some tipping point we’re near, where leaders will have to play smart. They’ll have to say they know more about the theory of evolution than the other candidate. ("Why, I just re-read the original Darwin last week!"). They’ll brag that they read Harvard studies proving that cutting taxes on the rich leads to the rich getting richer but nothing much useful to you and me.

They’ll claim that when they go bowling, between frames they study how to stop the spread of nuclear weapons.

I don’t know if it would change much. But at least I’d be less embarrassed about the whole thing.