Ah, the “lowered expectations” game, invented, I believe, to sell idiot Republican puppets when no one could expect them to win even the fluff ‘debates’ we get. I seem to first recall it during the rise of the assertion that Republicans who couldn’t construct a syllogism if you numbered the parts of it and handed those to them in the right order, were qualified to be president.*
As a child of blue collar America who, by any financial definition, remains a member of the same class, I am jamping sick and tired of the condescending talk about “hockey moms, soccer moms and Joe Sixpack” that spews out of the mouths of people making six and seven figure incomes, some who never attended a public school in their lives and who all think they have their thumb on the heart beat of the heartland because they touched down somewhere between Manhattan and LA during a connecting flight this year. And I’m sick and tired of the assertions of air heads in the media attributing their own lack of interest in reality, to us. If Sawyer and Gibson, the ABC morning date couple, has any interest other than their pointless careers and incomes, I’ve yet to see evidence of it. Forgive me for saying it, but unlike virtually the entire yakking class, most blue collar workers know how to produce something other than repetitions of talking points gleaned from Republican front sources, when those are not handed to them directly by the Republican Party. To get back to pundit logic.
Contained in that condescending stereotype is the idea that the large majority of Americans are too stupid to look past sports and drinking to understand that life is hard and that a lot of our problems are complex and hard to solve. Which is exactly what you would expect from oligarchs and plutocrats. “Soccer mom and Joe Sixpack” are white versions of insulting minstrel show stereotypes, a fact that the left could harness to better effect than adopting these anti-democratic ideas as stipulated assumptions. The People can grasp that life is more complicated than the buzzwords and talking points Sarah Palin’s handlers stuffed into her mouth this month. With some encouragement, The People can be rather impressive. We can even govern ourselves better than the oligarchs would ever want us to.
The American People don’t want their business conducted by someone who can meet the lowered expectations of Charles Gibson and the rest of the corporate Republican media, they want someone who might actually do something to make their children a better and more dignified life than can be had from Bud and circuses. We also deserve much better. Anyone who tries to sell us anything but the best should be kicked out the door.
Note: For fans of that kind of thing, what do you think of the idea that the bizarre Vaudeville style ads in the McCain-Palin campaign are supposed to elicit images calling to mind degrading black stereotypes in an attempt to frame the Obama campaign? I can easily imagine their behavioral-sci hirelings coming up with that idea. I’ve yet to figure out another explanation for it.
* It came about the same time the League of Women Voters had candidate debates yanked out of their competent hands, as the historian GWPDA pointed out on another blog the other day. But considering that interesting point will get me onto the folly of process liberalism and that’s not what this is about.