The Democratic/Liberal National Campaign Dilemma

Democratic pundits and political analysts keep talking about how Obama needs to fight back, point out the inconsistencies in McCain’s lies, etc…. However, the liberal elites (of which I am a proud member) consistently miss the point. Us liberals focus over and over again on rational and logical arguments to undermine McCain. The problem, and this has always been the problem back to Reagan, it is the Republicans who can only understand the way American’s really think. American’s are uneducated and therefore are not taught to think rationally and logically in the academic sense. Republicans know this and their policies reflect their understanding of this. In addition, religiosity, especially the 40% of the country who consider themselves “fundamentalist or born again” also think differently. Since their beliefs do not follow rational or logical rules, they are susceptible to arguments that also do not follow logical and are not rational. An example of this is the rallying support for Palin despite all of the contradictions in her professed faith and her actions (teen daughter’s pregnancy, earmarks, bridge to no where, banning books vs. constitution, abuse of power – trying to get her brother in law fired and then firing the guy who wouldn’t fire him, etc…). Religious people can accept these contradictions and twist them in their minds into good things about the person (as they have about their own hypocrisies and their own evangelical preachers – Jim Baker, Ted Haggard, Jerry Falwell and the rest of the bunch). It is a closed system of thought that incorporates any inconsistency into a system that twists the inconsistency into something that makes sense. This is actually the same thinking that enables an evangelical to believe in a literal interpretation of the bible and to profess to know “God’s Will” (as Sara Palin seems to be able to do – see links to her talking during a church service about the Iraq war. She also did this in the interview with Charlie Gibson when she twisted her sermon in church and implied that it was the same as Abraham Lincoln’s speech. This was a classic “small minded”/fundamentalist minded twist of logic.

So democratic political consultants will never get this problem right because they can not understand it. Americans have turned a very significant corner away from enlightenment ideology and toward theocracy. Even if you are not particularly religious but just not educated you are susceptible to the same thought process (a thought process that is quite psychologically primitive). And yes this sounds quite elitist, but fact are facts.
How one fights this is by presenting the same kinds of illogical and irrational arguments and using them to twist reality into what you want it to be. This is not something educated people are good at because it feels unreal, illogical, and irrational and therefore wrong. Unfortunately for us, republicans are very good at this and it fits into their worldview.