Cal Thomas notes that Republicans hope you are really, really stupid:
House Republicans are being told by their leaders to run campaigns this fall on a platform of fiscal discipline that includes cutting spending. This from a party that has given us new entitlement programs resembling Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society; this from a party that has set new records in “earmarks” for pork barrel projects in their home districts and states; this from a party that under Ronald Reagan at least tried to eliminate the Department of Education, but under President Bush has thrown new money at it with no appreciable improvement in academic achievement….
[House Majority Leader John] Boehner’s concluding line might have worked better in 1994 when hopes were high that a Republican majority would mean smaller government and less spending: “Reversing the culture in Washington that believes the solution to every problem involves more government and more spending is not easy.” It’s easier if you haven’t spent your principles and care more about staying in office than doing what you promised, but have refused to do.
There’s no way that approach will work. You need to be dumb enough to be a Democratic voter to fall for that sort of thing. It’s not that it’s hard to lie to Republicans – 2006 will be the most important election EVER – but to pull this sort of thing off, you need an audience of illiterates, dropouts and unemployables of the sort that the Democrats depend upon.
I’m no Republican, but I still find it tremendously amusing that so many Democrats actually think they are smarter than Republicans based upon their political affiliation. I mean, you’d think they’d be capable of taking into account that every exit poll shows the average Democrat to be poorer and less well-educated than the average Republican, right, but I suppose if they could do that, they probably wouldn’t be Democrats in the first place. Sure, the Dems have the eggheads in the professariat, but then, the professariat has been inordinately socialist in every country around the world since the 1920s.