Is Howard Dean just plain insane? Some further thoughts about the Audacity of Elitism

Continuing my point from a few days ago about how Barry Obama’s comments about the special election in Massachusetts are either loopy or profoundly arrogant, I must say that this particular Vertmonter is sadly off the rails. If you haven’t seen the interview with Chris Matthews, watch it now. Howard Dean thinks that Massachusetts citizens voted to put Scott Brown in the federal senate because they wanted to “send a signal to Washington”. Sure—but the tortured logic of how Dean thinks that’s good for his crypto-socialist wing of the Democratic Party is an impressively self-delusional feat of mental gymnastics.

Indeed, it’s hard to imagine a politician sounding sillier on MSNBC—unless that’s our own Kirk Watson here in Texas. What’s the link between these events? Kirk Watson had nothing to say on MSNBC two years ago because Barry Obama had nothing to offer but arrogance—the arrogance that eventually produced a sharp backlash against his 2000-page bomb of a healthcare regulation bill. Today, he’s making the same mistake in thinking that he can plow through his troubles with more of his trademark hot air.

Barry, like his nudgy Chicago friends Cass Sunstein and Dick Thaler, make their elitist livings presuming that the average person is too stupid to make his own decisions, short of occasionally sending nonsensical signals. Ah—they might say, that’s why we need to provide paternalistic guidance to the masses. From a party with up-is-down, down-is-up, Keynesian instincts, that’s almost to be expected.

We Republicans can naturally and effortlessly do better. It’s in our nature to presume that Joe the Plumbers, Ranchers, or Interior Designers can be expected to act decently and in their own interests, and that any failure to do is a useful factor in the discipline of the market. Repeatedly, if implicitly, denying that is what has now gotten the Democratic Party in serious trouble, and driven its centrists running for cover, and a sensible compromise on regulatory reform in healthcare. And we plan to capitalize on that.