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.)