Bob Herbert over at the NY Times lays out a pretty nice argument against voting for the guy you’d rather get a beer with:

The lesson for Americans suffused with anxiety and dread over the crackup of the financial markets is that the way you vote matters, that there are real-world consequences when you go into a voting booth and cast that ballot.

For the nitwits who vote for the man or woman they’d most like to have over for dinner, or hang out at a barbecue with, I suggest you take a look at how well your 401(k) is doing, or how easy it will be to meet the mortgage this month, or whether the college fund you’ve been trying to build for your kids is as robust as you’d like it to be.

Voters in the George W. Bush era gave the Republican Party nearly complete control of the federal government. Now the financial markets are in turmoil, top government and corporate leaders are on the verge of panic and scholars are dusting off treatises that analyzed the causes of the Great Depression. Mr. Bush was never viewed as a policy or intellectual heavyweight. But he seemed like a nicer guy to a lot of voters than Al Gore.

[via Adam Miller via NYtimes]

It’s kindof sad that being intellectual or liberal elite or what have you in this country is somehow seen as a bad thing. It’s like grade school where the smart kids get beat up.

Tags: intellectualism

This entry was posted on Tuesday, October 14th, 2008 at 6:25 pm and is filed under No Pulp. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.