I have always been fascinated by the exit poles of the last presidential election. The majority of people who voted for George W. Bush over John...
I have always been fascinated by the exit poles of the last presidential election. The majority of people who voted for George W. Bush over John Kerry said they did so because Bush was “one of them.” More people related to Bush as an equal than to Kerry who they thought of as an adjunct of a wealthy wife, and somehow “above them.” Kerry was too intellectual, too elitist. Now that the dust has settled from that election, hasn’t the absurdity of that hit you yet? After all, it was Bush who was the privileged son of an ex-president immersed in the oil business, and he was the one who had the luxury of running a couple of businesses into the ground without any real personal repercussions. Let me go out on a limb here, and state that ninety-nine percent of the people who felt he was “one of them” and who voted for W did not have that luxury.
Call me old-fashioned, but I want the leader of the country to be better than me. I don’t want to have a beer with my next president. I don’t really care if he is a Democrat or a Republican; I just want him to be vastly more intelligent than I am. I want him to have far reaching opinions about issues I cannot quite get my head around. I want to need to have a couple of days to digest his policy statements. It wouldn’t break my heart if I needed to consult a dictionary a time or two during a presidential speech. Former vice-president Dan Quayle took an enormous amount of heat (probably unjustifiably) for his mis-statement during a speech to the NAACP that “a mind is a terrible thing.” I want the next president to know why that is so funny.
