How can Bush’s elitist critics be so wrong?
February 5, 2003

Some years ago, as a member of the Board of Visitors at Duke University’s Public Policy School, I’d meet regularly with then-President (and later Sen.) Terry Sanford and my fellow board members. The overwhelming majority of them were, like Terry, good, honest old-style liberals who were a constant source of both amusement and wonderment.

Our meetings would usually begin with a reception at the president’s home where we would mingle with members of what the organizers liked to refer to as the Duke Community. I mention this now because what struck me about these folks was just how out of touch they were with what was going on outside their community.

Then-Sen. Jesse Helms (R-N.C.) was a phenomenon they just couldn’t understand. They had no idea how he had managed to get himself elected, but were convinced that he couldn’t conceivably be reelected — he was to serve two more terms — for the simple reason that none of them had ever met anyone who had voted for him.

In short, they didn’t get it and really never could. The people who toiled for a living outside their immediate environment might as well have inhabited Middle Earth.

I got to thinking of the folks with whom I sipped sherry at those receptions last week in the wake of President Bush’s State of the Union speech and the uproar over his decision to come down in a limited way on the side of those opposed to affirmative action. The evidence suggests that a lot of the president’s critics in this city don’t get it either and for the same reason. Like my old friends from Duke, they live in a world divorced from reality.

Network talking heads and analysts in the print media were comfortable echoing Democratic charges following the speech that Bush failed on both the domestic and foreign fronts to make much of a case for his policies. The public, however, must have been listening to someone else.

In ensuing days, pollsters began to discover that support for the president on Iraq was increasing because most of those polled concluded that we ought to act and act quickly — even if we have to do it without the United Nations — to deal with Saddam.

Those numbers must have been hard to swallow in some circles. After all, it had become generally accepted that whatever support Bush might once have had for action against Iraq had been frittered away because Hans Blix and his ragtag entourage of U.N. bureaucrats haven’t been able to come up with the “smoking gun” that Bush’s critics insist he must produce before taking action against Iraq.

If they were right about Bush’s crumbling support and the inadequacies of his speech, it’s hard to fathom how one can even begin to explain the growing public support it generated.

Either he had the support in the first place and was far more eloquent and substantively convincing than his critics claim. Or he managed to once again pull the wool over the eyes of a gullible public. His critics aren’t about to admit that they were wrong or that Bush did the job the polls suggest he did. So they are left to suggest that the people to whom he directed his message aren’t very bright.

The problem with this is that these are the same people they have to convince of the righteousness of their cause. Perhaps that’s why they continually underestimate their savvy. The simple-minded, but direct, attacks on a president they describe as continually plotting new ways to fleece us all for the financial benefit of a few of his wealthy friends has never played well — possibly because people are too smart for so simple-minded a message.

The question any reasonable observer ought to be pondering is: How can the president’s elite critics get it so wrong so often? The answer is simple enough. Many of the president’s most vociferous critics live and work in exotic enclaves among people who are far more partisan, ideological and cynical than most of their fellow citizens; enclaves as representative of this country as Duke is of North Carolina.

No wonder they don’t get it.

David Keene, chairman of the American Conservative Union, is a managing associate with the Carmen Group, a D.C.-based governmental affairs firm