be afraid

[rm]

I ranted about why on earth do people have this desire for the president to be "a regular guy"

This being Gather, some people replied with what I considered pretty terrifying responses.

http://www.gather.com/viewArticle.jsp?articleId=281474977219392

Comments

[p-zeitgeist.livejournal.com]

I blame the mainstream media.

No, seriously. Once upon a time, our papers of record reported on politics in such a way that you couldn't help understanding some part of what a president's job actually entailed. You knew what an issue was; you knew something about the competing policy considerations; you had some reason to think that brains were important to handle the job.

Now we have what Atrios calls "The Village," a cadre of elite political reporters tied intimately to the permanent political class. They're the ones who claim that Americans want a "regular guy" to be president, and they do all in their power to make that true. They report on politics as though it were a high-school popularity contest; their metamessage is that the minutiae of haircuts and regular-guy-ness are the important questions when selecting a president. If you're not fascinated by policy, enough to actively seek more thorough information out for yourself, that's all you'll know, and these non-explicit social messages are powerful things.

If we could eliminate a few hundred sinecured pundits, I bet you'd be amazed at the difference we'd see in just a couple of years. MoDo and Tweety and David Broder aren't America; they just want us to think they are, and have great big megaphones they can use to convince us.