I won’t go into how much life follows fiction, but I am remembering that on an old Red Skelton sketch from 1960 Red’s Clem Kadiddlehopper character who was portrayed as a dumb bumpkin got discovered and became an overnight political sensation as the country got swept up in the slogan, “Be smarter than the man you vote for.”
I am catching up on some articles which I was not seeing for a while and have noticed one from C. Ford Runge in MinnPost on a while back in which he pans what he perceives as Governor Palin’s anti-elitism.
He states that the
Intellectuals have been bewailing anti-intellectualism in politics for as long as it has been around. They sometimes are correct. And it seems that you cannot ever go wrong attacking the elite, although we do not always agree on who the elite actually are.
Intellectuals often feel superior by what they know and the dumb as me folks refuse to become intimidated by them [an attitude which can be confused as a reaction to an intimidation].
But both sides and the rest of us need to remember that we need to have open minds when we look at public affairs regardless of which side we are on.
Perhaps Runge’s article might be a place to start thinking of some of this. And, then again, it may just be a piece of gobbledegook.
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