Terry McAuliffe is on my television screen, going on about how Ohio and Pennsylvania, but not Missouri or Wisconsin or Virginia or Colorado or Iowa or Minnesota or Washington, are critically important swing states in the fall. Also, caucuses are unfair because every vote should count, but superdelegates are fair because the rules say so. Clinton apparently doesn’t feel the need to advance simultaneous arguments that don’t completely contradict each other.

This is obviously irritating on a basic level, but it also strikes me that Hillary Clinton, in common with George Bush, operates politically on the assumption that the people she is talking to are stupid. The spin coming out of the campaign is designed to influence people who don’t pay that much attention to politics, in a way that is deliberately dishonest.

By contrast, Obama and McCain, while they obviously try to frame arguments and facts in the most favorable light, seem to operate on the assumption that the voters are intelligent, and that a politician’s job is to put forward an argument — “I believe in perpetual war”, for example, or “I am a new creation” — which the American people can then either support or reject. After eight years of a government that lies to us continually about everything, this is quite refreshing.

Posted by Ben Brothers at 8:31 pm, 4 March 2008 and filed under 2008 Elections. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.