Oscar Jr. Was Here

The Angry Left II

On The New Republic Online, Jonathan Chait seems to confirm Robert Bartley's thesis discussed below.

Bartley:

That is to say, base Democrats think of themselves as the best people: the most intelligent and informed, the most public spirited, the most morally pure. This self-image has become more than a little shopworn over the years, and now George Bush's conservative Republicans threaten to strip it away. Inevitably such Democrats are angry.

and

What's more, this challenge is brought to them by a born-again MBA from Midland, Texas. This is a further challenge to their image of the best people, secular Ivy-league intellectuals. And to twist the knife, President Bush actually comes from an aristocratic family and went to prep school, Yale and Harvard. He has rejected these values for those of Texas.

Chait:

I hate President George W. Bush. There, I said it.

and

The persistence of an absurdly heroic view of Bush is what makes his dullness so maddening. To be a liberal today is to feel as though you've been transported into some alternative universe in which a transparently mediocre man is revered as a moral and strategic giant. You ask yourself why Bush is considered a great, or even a likeable, man. You wonder what it is you have been missing. Being a liberal, you probably subject yourself to frequent periods of self-doubt. But then you conclude that you're actually not missing anything at all. You decide Bush is a dullard lacking any moral constraints in his pursuit of partisan gain, loyal to no principle save the comfort of the very rich, unburdened by any thoughtful consideration of the national interest, and a man who, on those occasions when he actually does make a correct decision, does so almost by accident.

There. That feels better.

Fading birthright it is, then.

Posted by oscarjr at September 23, 2003 10:21 PM | TrackBack