In my time, I've known dukes, marquesses, earls, viscounts and other members of Britain's House of Lords and none of them had the contempt for the masses one routinely hears from America's coastal elites. And, in fairness to those ermined aristocrats, they could afford Dem-style contempt: A seat in the House of Lords is for life; a Senate seat in South Dakota isn't.
More to the point, nobody who campaigns with Ben Affleck at his side has the right to call anybody an idiot. H. L. Mencken said that no one ever lost money underestimating the intelligence of the American people. Well, George Soros, Barbra Streisand and a lot of their friends just did: The Kerry campaign and its supporters -- MoveOn.org, Rock The Vote, etc. -- were awash in bazillions of dollars, and what have they got to show for it? In this election, the plebs were more mature than the elites: They understood that war is never cost-free and that you don't run away because of a couple of setbacks; they did not accept that one jailhouse scandal should determine America's national security interest; they rejected the childish caricature of their president and paranoid ravings about Halliburton; they declined to have their vote rocked by Bruce Springsteen or any other pop culture poser.
I have high hopes for liberals in this country, and out of it, with respect to their ability to pull out of this self-defeating funk and be honest with themselves about how politics really works, and what motivates the average person. I credit the American and international press with laying off Kerry so much in the runup to the election and keeping it close, because if we had had the kind of hard look at Kerry that Newsweek has given us recently, it wouldn't have been nearly as close. I'll say it again, Evan Thomas was probably right when he said that having most of American journalism on his side was worth 15 points for Kerry, and that it would have been an utter blowout otherwise. I may never forgive them.
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