Wednesday, July 20, 2011

Super Rich, But Not Super Bright

Being rich means you know how to make a lot of money. Or, it may mean that someone in your family has known how to do it.

It takes considerable intelligence, coupled with hard work and luck, to make a lot of money.

And yet, intelligence is not fungible. Being smart about making money does not make you a wizard when it comes to politics. Being a great commodities trader does not make you an expert in matters of the heart.

So one would be led to conclude by reading Mike Allen’s report on a meeting that some super rich Republicans had with New Jersey Governor Chris Christie. The purpose of the meeting was to persuade Christie to enter the presidential race. He declined.

Led by Kenneth Langone and Bernard Marcus, co-founders of Home Depot, along with hedge fund titans Paul Tudor Jones and Stanley Druckenmiller, the group was reported as having explained its previous support for Barack Obama in the following terms.

As Allen paraphrases: “I’m a Republican but I voted for President Obama, because I couldn’t live with Sarah Palin. Many said they were severely disappointed in the president. The biggest complaint was what several called ‘class warfare.’ They said they didn’t understand what they had done to deserve that....”

To which Jim Geraghty offers an excellent retort: “But not all of us are shocked and stunned about Obama’s class warfare and his demonization of you and the sense that he doesn’t think of himself as your president too. Some of us spent two years telling anyone who would listen that he was a lot more liberal than his bland, blank-slate rhetoric suggested. And was all of this worth it because you ‘couldn’t live’ with Sarah Palin? Really? The prospect of having her living at the Naval Observatory was so epically offensive to your sensibilities that you really thought this, and all of the economic joy we’ve endured for the past 30 months, was the better option?”

If you are asking yourself why the liberal media made such a concerted effort to demonize Sarah Palin and to render her radioactive, well, now you know.

You would not normally think it, but some super rich people are very easily manipulated by what they take to be informed public opinion.

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