House of Eratosthenes

I’m listening to Herman Cain chew the fat with Neal Boortz, and the two are attributing to Armstrong Williams a wonderful and pithy quote: Suffering is a great teacher. I listened to this guy on the radio some twenty years ago and since then, I’ve failed to find any access to him. Best source I can find for a link on this quote, is here, which went up the day after the disaster. And I find some other beauties there:

This represents a national repudiation of reality: we have tossed out the doctor because we don’t like his prognosis.

The spending addict does not want an intervention; he wants more spending, no matter what.
:
It is apparently extreme now to balance a budget, to stay out of people’s lives, and respect tradition. Obama almost ran the table with swing states: it was a landslide.
:
I am not confident that the Republican Party can win national elections anymore.

I have to disagree on that last one. Suffering is a great teacher, isn’t it? I’ve already observed many times before, and I’m a bit short on time at the moment to go hunting around for links, but…people have a tendency to abjure themselves from truth and reason for however long they feel they can afford to do so. That really is just a more loquacious version of “suffering is a great teacher.”

In economics, the biggest concern I have is the same as everybody else’s: being, and remaining, gainfully employed during this coming massive onslaught of layoffs. In politics, where things are pretty much entirely out of my hands, I have feelings of actual dread — now that the two Davids, Axelrod and Plough, are sagely geniuses the whole landscape is about to be re-formed, re-planted and re-shaped to appeal to the low-information voter. This would be an enormous mistake. Show me ten low-information voters, and I can show you maybe one or two long-term low-information voters, probably no more than that. That elite sampling, of course, is going to be disproportionately likely to have entered Google query referenced at the top of this post on November 6th. They cannot be reached. Nobody should try. The remainder of them can be reached, but not actively, only passively. Suffering is a great teacher. They simply haven’t been taught enough. That second graphic is a great introductory course to the lesson, which teaches us:

• Uh no, the President cannot do anything magical to make our economy more better overnight;
• But the President certainly can do some things to screw it all up.

The big takeaway in the debacle involving the low-information voter is that such a voter, by his very nature, is going to be the very last among us to figure out that the policies are not working. President Obama already had the bedrock support of Mitt Romney’s forty-seven percent, who are endlessly opinionated about where the pork chops should be sent from the government’s barrel, and who should be obliged to fill it back up again, while they themselves aren’t putting anything in. But 47 is less than 50. To drag Obama across the finish line, you needed some “swing” voters who don’t know a damn thing, and can be told something only with great difficulty.

My concern is that this fine art of telling them things, is about to be elevated to a prestigious and coveted art form. Swinging a billion-dollar presidential election is no small thing. This is like an alternative language, a language that is about to become dominant because it is so cherished and decides so much. We are about to switch the dominant language to something that nobody, not even the speakers of it themselves, actually understands.

That would be an even bigger disaster than re-electing Obama.

Since Wednesday morning I’ve been privileged to watch all sorts of pundits and columnists talk down to the “Paul Ryan” crowd, preaching to them, condescending to them, scolding them, for getting overly wonky. “You’re the reason Romney lost” and “people don’t care about that” and all that…I’m sure it feels good to say that. It makes you look like you’re among this narrow band of cunning linguists who can babble away with this fake-out nonsense, therefore you should be elevated to a position of greater power. You get to strut around and feel victorious, like the pigeon on the chessboard. But, problem: This is the only benefit to be enjoyed from it. Ever. The spoils are political only, limited to whatever victories are to be enjoyed from commiserating with other people. Who are idiots. Which can be considerable when you’re participating in an election, but we aren’t supposed to spend our entire lives in elections. There is reality in which we live, and that technique doesn’t net us anything from it.

I guess my point is that if the candidate is found who can appeal to these low-information voters better than President Obama can, that candidate would be just another Obama. Such a candidate might have the letter R after his name, but that by itself doesn’t do anything to solve the nation’s problems. This would be an exercise in moving labels around, just like chairs on the proverbial Titanic, nothing more.

As a final comment, it bears repeating although we’ve pointed it out before: The democrats understand that Armstrong Williams is right, that suffering is a great teacher. Also, contrary to popular belief, merely being “poor” is not suffering. Maybe in other countries it is. It takes a lot more than being poor, to suffer in America. This has become a wonderful place to stay poor, for years and years, maybe for an entire lifetime and never learn a goddamn thing. That is the goal of the democrat party and has been for quite some time. This year, it’s working pretty well.

That doesn’t mean it always has to. All this stuff is cyclical and dynamic. At the end of the day, people don’t like to keep their options limited. Eventually, people want to get up off their butts and explore & refine new abilities they might have, new potential. I believe, over the long term, that hard-wired passion is the one that will win out.

To be honest, a little economic suffering can be good for people. We are much too soft and we have become accustomed to living beyond our means on every level. When I was growing up in the 50s, middle class meant something much different than today. They had grown up during the war and had gotten used to living pretty frugally. They saved because they needed to cover emergency expenses on their own. They cooked meals from basic ingredients. Have you looked at the frozen food section in the grocery store lately? It’s all prepared frozen meals, not frozen meat and veggies. People have this bad idea that the good times last forever and they no longer prepare for any hard times.

In case you think I’m being hard hearted here, I was out of work for 13 months after the tech bust. Went from $50k a year to taking a $9 an hour job when the unemployment went out. (One of my co-workers joked with me that he used to have more taken out in taxes from his previous job than he got for gross pay on the new one.) I can’t tell you how irritated I get with people that don’t take care of stuff now. I voted for Romney because I wanted to see people find jobs again and see the economy grow. I guess I was in the minority, so I can’t say I have a lot of sympathy for those that didn’t see this coming.
- teripittman | 11/09/2012 @ 18:20

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Low Information VotersFriday, November 9th, 2012

Low Information Voters
Friday, November 9th, 2012