David Broder is not a serious person

David S. Broder in his online chat Friday:

...I have come to have deep respect for the wisdom of the American people, who, in 2004, chose to reelect George W. Bush as president. I have been very critical of his policies, economic, diplomatic and military. But I am unwilling to assume that I am so much smarter than the voting public that I will dismiss as worthless someone they have chosen as president of the United States.

OK.  First of all the "American People" do not elect the President.  A majority of them do.  Usually.  I'll get to 2000 in a bit.  And it's the simplest majority.  We've had Presidents come into office who lost almost exactly as many votes as they won.  Tens of millions of American people did not choose them.

"The People have spoken" is a bromide.  We say stuff like that in order to smooth things over after an election.  It's our tactful way of reminding each other of the basic agreement behind a democratic form of government.  We all agree to accept the outcome of an election, no matter how close, as if it was unanimous.  We do this to give the outcome legitimacy.

We do not do it to grant it any sort of purity or to make it exempt from future criticism or revision.

We say it so the government can function.  Not so that it, the hive-like "it" made up of various politicians and time servers, or any individual office holder can claim to be the embodiment of the unquestionable wisdom of "the American People."

But even if we can pretend that the tens of million of American people who did not vote for the incoming President magically change their minds the morning after the election and start thinking as if they had voted for him and were glad of it, "the American People" have made a few mistakes in the past and there's no reason to think they won't make more in the future.

The American People elected James Buchanan, Warren G. Harding, and Richard Nixon.

The American People gave the job to the temperamentally unsuited John Adams, Herbert Hoover, and Jimmy Carter.

We have routinely overlooked the best person for the job and given it to someone else, who if he wasn't necessarily a bad choice was quite clearly not the best.

And amazingly we have never once elected a saint, an angel, or a superhero.

We keep putting human beings in the White House and from time to time all those human beings have gone and done what all human beings have done from time to time---screwed up.

George W. Bush is a human being, to say the best that can be said of him.

So you would think those facts, that "the American People" can and have made mistakes and that Presidents do bad jobs sometimes, would be of interest to someone who writes about politics for a living and convince him that the wisdom of "the American People" isn't of such a perfect quality that it needs to be slavishly flattered even in the face of the truth.

But even more than that, there has not been a President in this century whose claim to be the choice of the collective wisdom of "the American People" is more suspect than George W. Bush's.

First off, it's a fact that he lost in 2000.  The American People, as Broder pretends to see him, clearly did not vote for the guy.  He lost the popular vote.  If those ballots in Palm Beach County hadn't been so screwy he'd have lost Florida outright on election day.  If the Supreme Court hadn't jumped in and handed their boy the White House the recount very likely would have proceeded in a way that would have declared Gore the winner---which is why the Bush People were so anxious to stop it!

The American People did not make George W. Bush President.  His daddy's friends and his brother's henchmen and henchwoman did.

At the time the Broderite Beltway Insiders decided that for our own good we, the American People, had to be told to accept the Supreme Court's wisdom not our own.

Given that he stole the first election, Bush's second try to win the job legimitately is of dubious meaning.  If you shouldn't have been in the race in the first place, what does it matter where you finish?  You are still a cheater.

But Bush barely won that election anyway, and he should have carried it in a landslide.  What does that say about the wisdom of "the American People"?

If he won.  The evidence is mounting that he stole that one too.  Which is to say that the evidence is that in the last two elections the American People did not make George W. Bush their President.

But even if we pretend that they---we---did.  If we accept as Broder does that a convenient and polite fiction---"The People have spoken"---is a fact, that doesn't mean that the American People can't have changed their minds.

And on this one the evidence is clear and the American People are speaking with a much more united voice.

We don't like the guy anymore.

Over sixty per cent of us think he's screwing up even more than a regular human being is bound to.

If he ran for President tomorrow, George Bush would lose in a landslide.

The American People in their collective wisdom would squash him like a bug.

So why does Broder grant infallibility to our arguably collective wisdom as it was expressed going on three years ago now and ignore the evidence of our much more collected wisdom at the moment?

Either Broder believes that elections are somehow sacred things, more indicative of the collective wisdom than mere polls, or he thinks the American People are somebodies other than who we think we are.

Either way, David Broder is not a serious person.
______________________________________________

Related discussions of Broder's lack of seriousness:

Talk Left

Interesting Times

Think Progress.

Comments

[Chris the cop]

Officially, Bush won the State of Florida by 537 votes in 2000. Ralph Nader received about 90,000 votes in Florida. Assuming most of those would have voted for Gore, Bush and his pals didn't steal the election, Nader gave it to him.

Gore certainly won the popular vote in 2000 as did Bush in 2004.

Bush did not steal that election in 2004, either. I'm not sure of all the ins and outs of what happened in Ohio, but overall, Bush received about 3 1/2 million more votes than Kerry.

What made 2000 such a debacle was the fact that the election was so close.

[Mike Schilling]

We The People voted overwhelmingly in 2006 for congresspeople that would end the war. Broder calls them embarassments.

[SV]

"Either Broder believes that elections are somehow sacred things, more indicative of the collective wisdom than mere polls, or he thinks the American People are somebodies other than who we think we are."

Or, Broder recognizes that people are waking up to the fact that a corrupt incompetant sociopath lives in the White House, and is bending over backwards to pull a rhetorical sleight-of-hand, equating current criticism of Bush by anyone with an anti-democratic rejection of this sacred Will of the People.

Perhaps a better title for the post would be, "David Broder is not an Honest Person"?

[PooleBowman]

Mr. Mannion,

This analysis is excellent. Mr. Broder and his peers have
to be aware that they are writing nonsense. They are either
desperate to protect the current Washington, D.C. culture
and their place in it, or they are portraying President
Bush as a strong leader because they are being told to do
so by their superiors. Political analysts like Joe Klein,
Howard Fineman, Tim Russert, and Mr. Broder simply cannot
be as ignorant and stupid as they appear to be.
Your blog is one of my favorites. You are articulate,
logical, perceptive, and always interesting.

[Lemastre]

Many journalists suffer the same loss of contact with reality that the politicos do when they enter Washington, DC. Like Alice passing through the looking glass. Watching a presidential press conference indicates just how toothless the Washington press corps is. Anyway, Broder seems to have been on the fantasy side of the glass way too long.

[Fedup]

Unfortunately the truth is most Americans elect a President with their heart,and not with their brain. He has to be good looking and a smooth convincing talker-in my humble opinion that's why we are stuck with the likes of Bush and his corrupt buddies.The law of everages tells us, we most likely always get what we asked for.