I do not understand this Chris Cillizza post. Cillizza argues that conservatives have jumped all over Jonathan Gruber for two reasons: “(a) The ACA was made purposely vague to keep the public in the dark about its depth and breadth, and (b) liberals think conservatives are stupid.”
About the first item there is little ambiguity: Democrats did not merely keep discussion of the Affordable Care Act “vague,” they willfully misled Americans about the program they were establishing.
The second point, however, is odd. Gruber did not argue that conservatives are stupid; he argued that Americans are stupid, that Democrats were obliged to mislead the public because of the “stupidity of the American voter.”
“So, it’s not just that the Obama administration is trying to pull the wool over your eyes,” Cillizza writes. “It’s that they think you, conservative American, are too stupid to even notice.”
I am pretty sure that “American voter” and “conservative” are not synonyms, and that the country would be markedly different if they were. Too much is made of the “inside the Beltway” mentality, of Washington’s habit of regarding the rest of the country the way Jane Goodall regarded the residents of Gombe Stream National Park. But this is an interesting error on Cillizza’s part, assuming that conservatives as conservatives must be intellectually defensive rather than simply pointing out arrogance and vanity, as though Gruber were not working for the fellow who declared: “I’m a better speechwriter than my speechwriters. I know more about policies on any particular issue than my policy directors. And I’ll tell you right now that I’m going to think I’m a better political director than my political director.”
It is easy to slip into cheap Menckenism on the subject of American voters, but they are, it often seems, insanely stupid. It is a puzzle how Americans, who are the world’s smartest engineers, scientists, entrepreneurs, and firefighters, allow themselves to get took time after time by the half-bright collection of swindlers and criminals who aspire to rule us. That they also permit themselves to be condescended to by men such as Barack Obama and Jonathan Gruber is mysterious, too, and, contra Chris Cillizza, not to conservatives alone.