Talk radio and Fox News has been abuzz this week with quotes from Jonathan Gruber, the MIT professor who consulted to craft Obama’s health care program. Some audio/video clips have emerged in which Gruber admitted that key success factors in getting Obamacare and other government-sponsored healthcare programs (like Mitt Romney’s in New Hampshire) passed is voter stupidity. Conservatives are making as much noise as possible about this, feeling this vindicates what they have been saying for years about socialized healthcare – that if people only knew the facts they would never support it.

Frankly, I’m having difficulty identifying the group of constituents who are supposed to be offended. Both conservatives and liberals are well aware that voter stupidity is the single-biggest factor that tilts elections. Conservatives can’t understand how voters could be stupid enough to elect a President – not once but twice – who has no relevant experience to manage the scope and complexity of affairs the job requires. There is good reason why qualified presidential candidates have experience running large corporations, state governments, or congressional districts. They learn valuable experience about how to effect change that affects thousands or millions of people. They learn that you have to work with opposing points of view. They learn that problems are often far more complex than they seem in a 30 second sound bite on the evening news. And yet 50 million people were duped into thinking those qualifications aren’t relevant for leading the free world.

But neither are liberals shocked to hear that voters are stupid. Every republican administration is labeled as stupid, from Richard Nixon, Ronald Regan (Bedtime for Bonzo), Dan Quayle, George W. Bush… the repetitive (and unoriginal) moniker for every conservative icon and their supporters is ‘stupidity’.
Whichever side you are on, declaring voters as ‘stupid’ is the denouement in the exchange of ideas – after all, you can’t reason with an idiot so you need not try.

So neither die-hard conservatives nor liberals are surprised to be labeled stupid, and they readily believe that their political opponents are stupid. So who is supposed to be offended? There are those in the mushy middle who seem to be swayed by the most alluring rhetoric of each election. More accurately, they are victims of binary thinking that leads them to believe every issue has a ‘good’ choice and a ‘bad’ choice, and if they aren’t happy with the current situation they easily swoon for a new idea. But they don’t think of themselves as stupid. Quite the contrary, they fancy themselves the most discerning of voters. They don’t blindly follow the party line, they think through the issues and make informed decisions that shape the body politic. So they don’t identify with a label of ‘stupid’; it can’t possibly apply to them. Can it?

But it’s exactly this group who looked at the data and made a conscious choice to believe the rhetoric. They believed that costs wouldn’t go up, that you can keep your doctor, that the required insurance exchanges would legally and magically appear, and that an administration with no experience running anything larger than a community organization could masterfully overhaul a behemoth one sixth the size of the largest economy in the world. Maybe naivety is a more accurate term, although this group will not self-identify with it any more readily.
Personally, I don’t think Obama tried to deceive the public any more than I believe George W Bush tried to lie about WMDs. They were just wrong.

In the case of WMDs, the evidence was strong enough to convince the overwhelming majority of congress- both Democrats and Republicans (despite their selective memories)- and the consequences serious enough to demand action. We are frequently reminded of the costs of those decisions, but the costs of inaction, although incalculable, could have been much higher.

In the Obamacare case, a strong section of the populous disagreed with the analysis, goals, legality and execution of the program. They have earned a big “I told you so”, and can pass out some dunce caps to those who wouldn’t listen. The Supreme Court will hear some challenges that are likely to strike down further provisions of Obamacare, and the newly elected Congress may defund it altogether.

Those drinking the Obama Kool Aid would have followed him over the cliff no matter what. Even modest success would have generated enough momentum to overcome dissenters. But it couldn’t have got off the ground without the self proclaimed informed supporters who bought into the promises.

Hey mushy-middle: Dr Gruber is pointing at you.