Patterico's Pontifications

12/6/2018

Female Democratic Senator: We’re Just Too Darn Smart!

Filed under: General — Dana @ 5:47 pm



[guest post by Dana]

To which I’m compelled to ask: You sure about that??

I’m enjoying focusing on the left side of the aisle these days. They just keep on giving! (Not that the Republicans don’t bring the ridiculous as well, but I’m intentionally ignoring that side of the aisle, for the moment.) So, on the heels of JVW’s terrific post concerning the too clever by half Kamala Harris, let me just remind you of what another prominent Democratic woman, who also had her sights set on the presidency, foolishly said to wealthy elite donors at a fundraiser in Manhattan. Foolish, yes, but almost certainly revealed the true heart of liberal progressives:

You know, to just be grossly generalistic, you could put half of Trump’s supporters into what I call the basket of deplorables. Right? The racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamaphobic — you name it. And unfortunately there are people like that. And he has lifted them up. He has given voice to their websites that used to only have 11,000 people — now 11 million. He tweets and retweets their offensive hateful mean-spirited rhetoric. Now, some of those folks — they are irredeemable, but thankfully they are not America.”

It seems to be baked in with female Democrats in politics, this compulsion to sneeringly dismiss others who hold views and beliefs different than their own as something less than. The presumption that what they say is truth and light, and the very insight needed at any given moment seems de rigueur within their ranks. This week, removing any doubt that this stunning arrogance is widespread and representative of liberals at large, is Senator Mazie Hirono (D-HI). During a recent interview with Dahlia Lithwick at the “Bend Towards Justice” conference, Hirono, while answering a question about why the liberals haven’t reproduced the “focus and intensity” conservatives used to explain “why the courts matter, unfortunately also demonstrated that she learned nothing from Hillary’s infamous blunder. And how smart is that?

One of the things that we Democrats have a really hard time with is connecting people’s hearts instead of here (points to brain). We’re really good at shoving out information that touch people here (points to brain), not here (points to her heart). And I have been saying at all of our Democratic retreats that we need to speak to the heart, not in a manipulative way, not in a way that brings forth everybody’s fears and resentments, but truly to speak to the heart so people actually know that we’re actually on their side. We have a really hard time doing that and one of the reasons that was told to me at one of our retreats was that we Democrats know so much. That is true.

And we have to tell everybody how smart we are and so we have a tendency to be very left brain and we think, really? That is not how people make decisions. So one of the books I always bring up is “The Righteous Mind” by Jonathan Haidt where the image is of an elephant. And the elephant is making all the decisions – go right, go forward, whatever. There’s a rider on the elephant. The rider simply explains the elephant’s decisions. Republicans speak to the elephant, the Democrats speak to the rider. That is why we’re not speaking to people here (heart) and we’re just mainly going here and it’s a huge issue.

Got that? Democrats are just smarter than everyone else. They can’t help it. God just shone more brightly upon them. Or maybe they slipped out of the primordial ooze with an extra stash of brain cells. And if they can’t help being smarter than the rest of us, then we just can’t help being, you know, not as smart.

Yet it’s all pretty amusing when one considers how frequently everyone’s favorite daffy socialist niece, the newest darling of the left, regularly says the funniest things

Anyway, I thought I’d tie up the post with another female liberal progressive, who also has high hopes of becoming the (first female) President of the United States. [Ed. I could have told her this would happen, in spite of not being Hirono-smart…]:

[Elizabeth] Warren, a progressive who is widely expected to launch a presidential bid, faced criticism when she unveiled a video in October aimed at putting to rest questions about whether she has Native American heritage. The attempt to stand up to President Donald Trump’s attacks — he repeatedly calls her “Pocahontas” — seems to have backfired. The New York Times reported Thursday, “Advisers close to Ms. Warren say she has privately expressed concern that she may have damaged her relationships to Native American groups and her own standing with activists, particularly those who are racial minorities.”

I don’t know. Seems to me if these Democrats were as smart as they believe themselves to be, they would’ve studiously paid attention to Hillary Clinton during the campaign, and wouldn’t be saying and doing such dumb stuff themselves.

(Cross-posted at The Jury Talks Back.)

–Dana


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