President Obama\u2019s decision to have himself surrounded with school children as he announced his \u201cproposals\u201d to deal with \u201cgun violence\u201d on Wednesday caused a lot of hand wringing among his opponents.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cDemagogic,\u201d \u201coffensive,\u201d \u201cdisgusting,\u201d and \u201cshameless\u201d were just some of the adjectives used to describe it.<\/p>\n
I have no interest in defending Obama.\u00a0 Anyone with an IQ above four and just a modicum of decency has no difficulty seeing the President\u2019s rush to exploit children\u2014both those who lost their lives in the Sandy Hook School shooting as well as those with whom he surrounded himself\u2014as the intellectually and morally impoverished enterprise that it is.<\/p>\n
But what does rationality and moral virtue have to do with political strategy?\u00a0<\/p>\n
Obama and his fellow travelers on the left are often accused by their rivals on the right of \u201cemoting.\u201d That the left is not infrequently guilty of this charge is true enough.\u00a0 Yet what those on the right refuse to grasp is that what they perceive to be a weakness is, politically speaking, the left\u2019s greatest strength.<\/p>\n
While this doesn\u2019t accord with the myth\u2014and, yes, it is indeed a myth\u2014of the Wisdom of the American People, the brute, immovable fact of the matter is that when it comes to politics, the vast majority of American voters do not live by reason.\u00a0 Emotion is the air they breathe.\u00a0 Emoting is what they do.<\/p>\n
That is, the left stands a far greater chance of making inroads with the average American voter because the left speaks his language.<\/p>\n
Notice, I am not suggesting for a moment that the average American<\/em> acts unduly irrational or emotional. It is the average American voter <\/em>who acts thus.\u00a0 It is within the realm of politics, particularly national politics, that he is most susceptible to abandoning reason, for the average voter is just not all that attentive to the events that unfold on this stage\u2014or how those events are framed so as to serve predetermined political ends.<\/p>\n As the conservative theorist Joseph Schumpeter noted, the average voter \u201cdrops down to a lower level of mental performance as soon as he enters the political field.\u201d Schumpeter explains that he \u201cargues and analyzes in a way which he would readily recognize as infantile within the sphere of his real interests.\u00a0 He becomes a primitive again.\u00a0 His thinking becomes associative and affective.\u201d<\/p>\n Translation: the average voter emotes.\u00a0<\/p>\n Not only does the average voter \u201ctend to yield to extra-rational or irrational prejudice and impulse,\u201d but \u201cbecause he is not \u2018all there,\u2019 he will relax his usual moral standards as well and occasionally give in to dark urges which the conditions of private life help him to repress.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n The average voter then becomes easy prey for \u201cgroups with an ax to grind,\u201d groups that \u201care able to fashion and, within very wide limits, even to create the will of the people<\/em>\u201d (emphasis added).\u00a0 \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n Whether Obama and his ilk have ever read Schumpeter is irrelevant.\u00a0 They are more than slightly aware of the truth of which he speaks.<\/p>\n And there is nothing or no one that they won\u2019t manipulate to advance their political agenda.<\/p>\n No class of persons, no event, and no emotion is exempt from being conscripted into the service of perfecting the left\u2019s mission to \u201cfundamentally transform\u201d the country.<\/p>\n Republicans can bellyache all day long about Obama\u2019s and the Democrats\u2019 tactics.\u00a0 Or the former can realize that only by playing the latter\u2019s game, only by combating image with image, can Republicans defeat Democrats.<\/p>\n Republicans are not very adept at this sport.\u00a0 Sadly, there is more than enough proof of this, but the most recent exhibition comes to us from last year\u2019s presidential race when the candidates insisted upon centering the bulk of their focus on debts, deficits, and numbers that aren\u2019t remotely fathomable to the average voter.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n If Republicans understood what Schumpeter and Obama know, then on Wednesday they could\u2019ve choreographed a rebuttal to Obama\u2019s push for greater \u201cgun control.\u201d Rather than surround themselves with children, they could\u2019ve surrounded themselves with images\u2014statues and\/or paintings\u2014of the men who ratified the United States Constitution. They could\u2019ve delivered their rebuttal in front of a huge screen with the words of the Second Amendment on it, or grand illustrations of American colonists voluntarily taking to the hills and the streets with their guns in order to do battle with the English King and his Redcoats who threatened their liberties.<\/p>\n Besides reminding Americans of their Fathers and their Fathers\u2019 legacy, this tactic could have also sent the powerful, if subtle, message that while Obama and company prefer to turn to little children for advice on issues of national import, the President\u2019s enemies consult the wisdom of the country\u2019s Founders.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" President Obama\u2019s decision to have himself surrounded with school children as he announced his \u201cproposals\u201d to deal with \u201cgun violence\u201d on Wednesday caused a lot of hand wringing among his opponents.\u00a0 \u201cDemagogic,\u201d \u201coffensive,\u201d \u201cdisgusting,\u201d and \u201cshameless\u201d were just some of the adjectives used to describe it. I have no interest in defending Obama.\u00a0 Anyone with…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":399,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-715","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"yoast_head":"\n