Maybe we're not idiots! The invaluable Mark Steyn

We weren't dumb enough to vote Kerry


[All emphasis ours]

...

It wasn't the economy, stupid. It was the stupidity, stupid. No man is an island, but the Democrats expect voters to act as if they are. Don't think about national security and war and Iraq and Iran and North Korea - that's all way beyond a loser like you. You're too "terrified" about your job to be bothered with the foreign pages. It's practically the Depression out there.

OK, it's not. But it's a recession. OK, it's not. But there aren't any jobs out there. OK, there are. But they're not like the jobs you used to have, when you could go to the mill and do the same job day in day out for 45 years, and it made it so much easier for us come election time because there were large numbers of you all in the same place when we flew in for the campaign stop. But the point is: you are an island, stick to "pocketbook issues", think about yourself.

The Left always used to accuse the Right of appealing to the voters' selfishness, but this year the Dems did and it got them nowhere.

...

[A]fter listening to John Edwards's Dickensian tales of "two Americas" for months on end, I'm convinced that any red-state county knows more about business than your average Massachusetts senator, tenured Harvard professor or Boston Globe editor. When John Kerry gets his hair done at Cristophe's in Washington for somewhere north of $75, that high-priced stylist is an employee. If he'd ever stopped to have it done for $10 by DeeDee in a hair salon in a small town, he'd discover that she's a one-woman business.

When he goes to his favourite restaurant in Washington, the waiter's an employee. When he drops by a diner on Main Street in some nowhere burg to pretend to eat a hot dog for a photo op, the waitress might well be like the lady who served me lunch on Sunday: she has her own house-cleaning business, but does some part-time work at the local school and a couple of shifts at the diner for a bit of extra cash.

She's a small business, and she knows more about her tax return than Teresa Heinz Kerry knows about hers. Mrs Kerry farms it out to the best advisers money can buy, and they do a grand job: she's one of the richest women in the world and she paid 12 per cent tax last year. It makes no difference whether the tax rate is 20 per cent, 50 per cent or 88 per cent: the Kerrys of the world will still pay 12 per cent.

The American people don't want to be condescended to by ketchup heiresses, billionaire currency speculators, $20-million-a-picture Hollywood pretty boys, and multi-millionaire documentary-makers posing as bluecollar lardbutts.

The Democrats keep talking to people as if they're like John Edwards's 40-year mill-workers, but that's not what work is any more, and a 23-year-old hairdresser can know enough about starting and running a business to be unimpressed at a few footling tax credits dangled in front of her by a 60-year-old lifelong "public servant" lucky enough to be living a grand old life thanks to his billionaire wife's first husband.
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Just ... BRAVO ... we've never quite understood why the Left considers itself so intellectually superior, but in nearly four decades we've learned this much: people who make a show of how "smart" they are usually aren't.

Truly smart people let their actions and achievements speak for themselves.

The teenage boy who hands us our Wendy's Big Bacon Double Classic Combo (with Biggie Fries) understands more about how the economy works than Paul Krugman.

The pregnant single girl with the GED who realizes she is carrying a child, not an "unviable tissue mass" has it all over Shrillary Clinton where wisdom is concerned.

And the 12 year old boy, picked on and taunted by the playground bully till he has no choice but to beat the crap outta the SOB possesses more common sense vis-a-vis matters geopolitical than the entire editorial staff of the NY Times.