ChristopherWhite.info

My diplomate Jon, writing on Karl Rove’s departure from the White House, suggests that his getting George Bush into office took a stroke of genius:

Getting Bush a job at McDonalds would have been an achievement, but in getting his man into the White House Rove has conjured a trick that must have David Blaine salivating. Other than his famous father, Bush seemingly has no redeeming qualities. Turning him into a President must have been the equivalent of telling Bill Clinton to keep his trousers on – inevitably impossible.

But he did it (Rove that is, not Clinton). Twice. He got a hick into the White House. And now he is taking his bow, his work done. He is leaving the White House as a man who must be the most in demand political mastermind in the world, a svengali who could probably get Vinny Jones voted Mr Gay UK.

But in fact Bush might just have won that election not in spite of his obvious stupidy, but because of it.

In Bring Home The Revolution, Jonathan Freedland argues that the many in Britain in who deride American culture as “low-brow” are dead wrong:

The transparency of American public speech is a direct product of the country’s origins. Born without fixed classes, the United States forged a language largely free of the dialects of status that mark out British English. Colloquial plain talk is the universal idiom of America, where professors and ball players alike refer to themselves as ‘the guys’.

…

Americans prefer plain speaking, using a vocabulary that varies surprisingly little across different income groups. British viewers of the Boston trial of Louise Woodward, the Chesire teenager charged with murdering a baby in her care, were startled by the unvarnished, simple speech of both the judge and the lawyers. They bantered back and forth, remarkably free of the polysyllabic, Latinate language one might hear in a British courtroom. They spoke like the people whose fate they were deciding, in a colloquial and unpompous voice.

The transpose of our view that unpretentiousness indicates stupidity is what delivered the American electorate Bush — particularly after the relatively intellectual Clinton lost their trust over zippergate. They thought they were getting a plain-speaking, average-Joe everyman. They got instead a moron.

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