The Idiot Rating

I’ve been pondering this poll where people are asked if they approve or disapprove of some political figure, say the president. The statistic you get from this poll is the approval rating. Bush, we have been told, is at an all-time low for presidents since the poll began, at around thirty percent. (That’s amazing, really, to consider that almost a third of all American still think he’s doing a good job. Who are these people? Rubes!) Actually, you can go to Real Clear Politics and find out that the average of all polls measuring whether people approve or disapprove of the job Bush is doing is 30.08% approval and 65.2% disapproval.

What has intrigued me is the use of the word “approval.” This is something that parents say about their children. Say my son blows by his allotted text messages of 200 and ends up using 5,749. (Just a hypothetical example.) What do I tell him? That he’s a f------- idiot? Not if I’m a good Dad. No, I tell him I disapprove of his lack of discipline and take his phone away for the rest of the month. When I use this approval/disapproval metric, I can measure the quality of his behavior, or his job performance as an adolescent, and still show that I love him. Our relationship is still sound. Neither one of us will disown the other, or use poison.

But why use the same metric for a president? “Mr. Bush, we think you’re doing a bad job, but we still love you.” I don’t think so. I think it’s time to be honest. We should have a poll that asks people if they think Bush is an idiot. Just imagine being approached on the street by a straight-laced poll-taker and have her ask, “Do you believe President Bush is an idiot, or not an idiot?” Some people might call this push-polling, where you are trying to plant an idea in the subject’s mind. But to counter that charge, you can have another question where you ask, “Do you believe President Bush is a genius or not a genius?”

Now we’re dealing with some effective polling that might have consequences. By disapproving of Bush’s job performance, we’re not calling into question his legitimacy, because we’re still implying that we love him. But if over half the American public think he is an idiot, then he has to deal with that—maybe take some night courses or something. Just imagine a journalist asking Bush during a press conference, “President Bush, how do you deal with the fact that 63% of the public think that you are an idiot?”

Of course the main-stream polling outfits can’t actually ask this question. But some of the more radical ones can, or perhaps John Stewart of the Daily Show. That’s whom I’m directing this post at, really. I want the Daily Show to start polling the public with questions that people can readily understand and respond to honestly. The other question I think we should ask is, “Is President Bush a liar, or not a liar.”

And to just put my money where my mouth is, on my next teaching evaluation I’m going to have a question, on a scale of 1-5, “Is the professor an idiot?”

What’s a Rube?

Let me just warn you a bit, but calling someone a rube is politically incorrect, in that it’s not a nice thing. I first heard rube when I was on spring break from college, and visited a friend’s house in Philadelphia. He introduced his father to me as “the Rube,” and then explained that it was nickname given to him by the urban sophisticates in the post office where he worked. Rube, you see, had come from rural Pennsylvania to work in the big city. A rube is short for a country bumpkin. You can fool them real easy, those bumpkins.

Hillary treats her supporters like rubes. Bush and McCain do too. They act as if they are stupid. Hillary says things like she is winning the popular vote in the primaries. A little fact-checking proves that is not so. She wants to count Florida and Michigan, when she had agreed that their votes would not count. She claims that she is being forced out of the primaries, and that has never been done before. Fact-checking again shows that Bill Clinton claimed victory against Jerry Brown before all the votes were in. She claims that she wants to hear from the entire electorate, when, obviously, she would have been ecstatic to have never had to have campaigned after Super Tuesday. But then hey, maybe she likes to spend millions of her own dollars being a tourist in places she never dreamed existed.

OK, she says these things. But the strange thing is, people, previously sane people who can see it when Bush or Cheney start slinging it, believe her. It’s when I begin to doubt my own sanity. I hold up four fingers and ask everyone how many fingers I’m holding up. The Hillary supporters squint at me and ask if it’s a trick question.

This is why Hillary’s campaign has flummoxed me. It’s not like arguing with a pro-life advocate. That person has an honestly different perspective. Hillary, on the other hand, is pretending to be stupid, and expecting everyone to believe her. Sure, you can mention assassination, because it just reminds people of a time, or date in history. Nothing else. Who would think? Sure, you can say caucuses don’t really count, because those are only the elites who have free time on their hands, not the mobilized people who will get out the vote in the general election. She says we need to cut the gas tax. Never mind that rising oil prices are probably good, and inevitable, in the long run, and that reducing the tax load instead on middle and lower income people would give them more choice in how to travel.

It’s exactly the same thing that Republicans have been doing with voter fraud, by cracking down on people who fake their identities to sway the election. Problem is, voter fraud doesn’t happen. Sure, cracking down on voter fraud keeps minorities and the poor from voting, but gosh, that wasn’t their intent!

Political fictions. That’s what they are. Everyone has to use some of them, or else you can’t get elected, at least not president. Gore used them when he disavowed papers he wrote in college with the same excuse politicians use now for early drug use: I was young and didn’t know better. Obama uses them when he placates the coal industry and nuclear power. People who don’t use political fictions, like Ralph Nader or Noam Chomsky, aren’t even invited to the cocktail parties.

But again, the strangest thing about this primary season is that more people are believing political fictions than I’ve ever seen before. It’s as if everyone wants to be a rube from the hills of Appalachia.

(Post script: One of my favorite authors, and the writer to most affect my life, is from the hills of Appalachia, Wendell Berry.)