MIT Professor Jonathan Gruber is being publicly excommunicated and excoriated for committing what constitutes a cardinal sin in Washington these days: telling the unvarnished truth. And, miraculously, his sin has inspired Democrats and Republicans to unite in their joint (and several) condemnation of him.
For the uninitiated, Gruber was as much the architect of Barack Obama’s healthcare reform as Karl Rove was of George W. Bush’s neo-con agenda.
Yet no less a person than Obama himself is leading the chorus of those condemning Gruber:
He ‘never worked on our staff,’ President Obama said this weekend in Brisbane, Australia, (even though Gruber was paid almost $400,000 by his administration, is the intellectual author of the individual mandate and met in the Oval Office with Obama and the head of the Congressional Budget Office to pore over the bill). ‘I don’t know who he is,’ Nancy Pelosi declared on Capitol Hill (even though she repeatedly cited him by name during the Obamacare debate).
(Washington Post, November 17, 2014)
This is why the Democrats’ effort to throw him under the bus is so brazenly hypocritical. But what’s even more contemptible is that they are doing so simply because he admitted that, in drafting the signature legislation of Obama’s presidency, he and fellow architects had to take into account the growing bane of American politics: the stupidity of the American people.
Democrats began disowning him last week after Republican operatives flooded the media with old video clips of Gruber blithely stressing and reinforcing this point. Here, for example, is what one clip shows him saying about their strategy for ensuring passage of the Affordable Care Act (aka Obamacare):
The lack of transparency is a huge political advantage [and] the stupidity of the American voter … was really, really critical for the thing to pass.
(Gruber, CSPAN, March 11, 2010)
On the other side, the Republicans’ effort to paint him as a political fraudster is as disingenuous as it is ignorant, which, alas, defines almost every Republican criticism of Obama, his policies, and anybody associated with him … or them.
In this case, those clips merely show Gruber stating what has been a fact of American politics for over 100 years.
For example, H.L. Mencken was arguably the most admired and accomplished journalist, essayist, magazine editor, satirist, critic of American life and culture, and scholar of American English in U.S. history. Yet Mencken’s dismay, with what he might have called the stupidity of the American voter, caused him to lament as follows:
No one in this world, so far as I know — and I have searched the records for years, and employed agents to help me — has ever lost money by underestimating the intelligence of the great masses of the plain people. Nor [more to the point] has anyone ever lost public office thereby.
(Chicago Daily Tribune, September 19, 1926)
I’m no Mencken, but even I have had cause to lament the same in such commentaries as “On Syria and almost Every Other Issue, the American People are Insolent, Ignorant Idiots … and Their Congressional Representatives are Pandering, Pusillanimous Pussies,” September 10, 2013.
More to point, here is how I echoed Mencken’s estimation of “the great masses of the plain people” with respect to the very legislation Gruber was referencing:
Nothing indicates how much delusions of despair are undermining Obama’s presidency quite like poor, unemployed and uninsured (White) folks, who depend on food stamps for their daily bread, opposing his healthcare reform (aka Obamacare).
They are doing so because they too have bought into the Republican ‘big lie’ that this reform, which Republicans like former President Nixon once championed, will turn America ‘into a socialist state like Europe [sic].’ (Polls routinely show that the vast majority of those who oppose Obamacare actually approve of its provisions.) Idiots!
(“Delusions of Despair Undermining Obama’s Presidency,” The iPINIONS Journal, June 21, 2012)
Stressing and reinforcing this point, the American digital media company Vox reported on November 15 that 50 percent of the American people think the unemployment rate is 32 per cent. It’s 5.8. So bear this in mind the next time you hear a politician invoking the “will of the American people” – as if it were some divine ordination.
In which case, the real sin here is not what Gruber said about the stupidity of the American voter. Instead, it’s the way Democrats and Republicans are now falling all over themselves to disown and exploit him, respectively, for craven political gain.
For, to paraphrase Mencken, no politician in America, so far as I know – and I’ve googled key words as well as polled historians on this – has ever lost a debate or an election by pandering to the stupidity of the American people.
Related commentaries:
Delusions…
The American people are insolent, ignorant…
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