Ignorance Is Fleeting

“You may fool all the people some of the time, you can even fool some of the people all of the time, but you cannot fool all of the people all the time.”

Abraham Lincoln, September 1858, Speech in Clinton, Illinois

This from Mark Steyn on the travails of Obama:

So what went wrong? According to Barack Obama, the problem is he overestimated you dumb rubes’ ability to appreciate what he’s been doing for you. “That I do think is a mistake of mine,” the president told ABC’s George Stephanopoulos. “I think the assumption was if I just focus on policy, if I just focus on this provision or that law or if we’re making a good rational decision here, then people will get it.”

But you schlubs aren’t that smart. You didn’t get it. And Barack Obama is determined to see that you do. So the president has decided that he needs to start “speaking directly to the American people.”

Wait, wait! Come back! Don’t all stampede for the hills! He only gave (according to CBS News’s Mark Knoller) 158 interviews and 411 speeches in his first year. That’s more than any previous president — and maybe more than all of them put together. But there may still be some show out there that didn’t get its exclusive Obama interview — I believe the top-rated Grain & Livestock Prices Report — 4 a.m. Update with Herb Torpormeister on WZZZ-AM Dead Buzzard Gulch Junction’s Newstalk Leader is still waiting to hear back from the White House.

But what will the president be saying in all these extra interviews? In that interview about how he hadn’t given enough interviews, he also explained to George Stephanopoulos what that wacky Massachusetts election was all about:

“The same thing that swept Scott Brown into office swept me into office,” said Obama. “People are angry and they’re frustrated, not just because of what’s happened in the last year or two years but what’s happened over the last eight years.”

Got it. People are so angry and frustrated at George W. Bush that they’re voting for Republicans. In Massachusetts. Boy, I can’t wait for that 159th interview.

Presumably, the president isn’t stupid enough actually to believe what he said. But it’s dispiriting to discover he’s stupid enough to think we’re stupid enough to believe it. . . .

Americans may, by and large, be politically ignorant. And true, they voted for Obama and the snake oil he was selling as our corrupt MSM spared no effort to insure that they would be kept in ignorance. But Americans are not stupid. A year on, they can take stock for themselves. So long as the democratic process remains not yet wholly corrupted by vote fraud and selective recounts, they will take revenge. And as Obama's crashing poll numbers (and the crashing ratings number for liberal media) would seem to indicate, once Americans have seen the artifice, they really get a little annoyed at still being treated as idiots.

This is a real problem for far left ideologues, since at the very center of their world view is a heartfelt belief in the superiority of their intellect and, thus, both the absolute truth of their cause and the necessity of imposing their will. It is a paradigm that will never allow the ideologue to realize that they might be wrong. As we see it being played out by Obama, if the voters don't agree, that can only be because they don't understand. Left wing ideologues conflate the temporary ignorance of an electorate that voted them into office with a congenital stupidity that only exists in the arrogance of their imagination.

No matter. By all means Mr. President, talk on, talk on.