David Brooks offers some tips for those running for President in 2004. Noteworthy among them is this:
Don’t worry about respectable opinion. If you read the best newspapers and magazines in the country, you will get the impression that SUVs are decadent and McMansions are vulgar. But millions of Americans love SUVs and buy McMansions as soon as they can afford to. If you follow respectable opinion, you will misapprehend the tastes and priorities of the bulk of voters. More important, you will be following the cultural signals that molded all the other conventional, and failed, candidates before you. If you are going to run against the political elite, you should probably go for broke and run, in part, against the cultural elite, too.
It’s the cultural elite, not the masses, that are out of touch with society. Remember how in the 2000 campaign Gore didn’t bring up his Earth in the Balance plan to replace everyone’s car with a 3-cylinder wind-up cart? He was surprisingly silent about that–good judgment on his part (or most likely, his advisors part).
I curse the UT professor that put that Gore book on our reading list…not that I actually read the books on our reading list. Great article, though.