Glenn Greenwald: Public opinion merits "the profoundest respect"

[meegbear]

In his New York Times column today, David Brooks (as he so often does) recites emerging conventional Washington wisdom, demanding that Democrats abandon health care reform if the Republicans today win the Massachusetts Senate seat:

Many Democrats, as always, are caught in their insular liberal information loop. They think the polls are bad simply because the economy is bad. They tell each other health care is unpopular because the people aren’t sophisticated enough to understand it. Some believe they can still pass health care even if their candidate, Martha Coakley, loses the Senate race in Massachusetts on Tuesday.

That, of course, would be political suicide. It would be the act of a party so arrogant, elitist and contemptuous of popular wisdom that it would not deserve to govern. Marie Antoinette would applaud, but voters would rage.

The American people are not always right, but their basic sense of equilibrium is worthy of the profoundest respect.

Here we have one of the most common and manipulative tools of the political class: pretending to care about public opinion only when it's consistent with one's own views (it's "worthy of the profoundest respect"), and disregarding it as the irrelevant bile of the ignorant rabble when it's not.

I remember another policy that was even more unpopular with the "Ameican people" than Obama's health care plan. It was called the Iraq War. Throughout 2006 and 2007, overwhelming majorities of Americans were not only opposed to the war, but favored a quick timetable for withdrawal. So intense was the opposition that the Republicans suffered one of the century's most thorough and humiliating midterm election defeats in 2006. Yet there was David Brooks writing column after column demanding that public opinion be ignored, mocking withdrawal as deeply Unserious, advocating continued occupation, insisting that the superior wisdom of a select elite govern our policy rather than ignorant mass sentiment. Brooks and his neoconservative friends wanted to keep sending other Americans (but never themselves) off to that war to die even though only a small minority of citizens supported it. Marie Antoinette indeed. Opposition to Bush's surge was particularly intense -- close to 70% -- yet Brooks was heaping praise on John McCain for ignoring public opinion and supporting Bush's plan ("when the Iraq war was at its worst, and other candidates were hiding in the grass waiting to see how things would turn out, McCain championed the surge . . . . He did it knowing that it would cost him his media-darling status and probably the presidency. But for years he had hated the way the war was being fought. And when the opportunity to change it came, the only honorable course was to try").

<snip>

http://www.salon.com/news/opinion/glenn_greenwald/index.html?story=/opinion/greenwald/2010/01/19/brooks

[pundaint]

1. Is it possible that Brooks learned from his previous experience that ignoring

the will of the People really can affect outcomes at the polls? Nah!