“Obama Is Stupid”:
The Stupid Thing Conservatives Love To Say
Over at Death Race 2012, GQ’s blog about the presidential election campaign, we asked one of our favorite writers, a mischievous man who goes by the name Mobutu Sese Seko, to figure out what’s behind one of the conservative punditry class’s favorite attacks on President Obama: namely, that he’s dumb. Rarely has an argument that is so self-evidently, well, dumb gotten so much traction. What gives? A peek at Mobutu’s dismantling of it is below. Click here to read the full piece.
Newt boasts that these debates will be conducted without teleprompters—a shallow dig at Obama that feeds the president’s critics two satisfying lines of assault. For conservatives and liberals infuriated by Obama’s measured cadences and insistence on rhetorical balance and compromise, it suggests that his unflappability is all pretense, unsustainable in the real world that real men inhabit, where spitting is permitted and there are Islamofascists to wrestle shirtless. But it also suggests something far more satisfying to the GOP base: Newt, ever the cherub-faced and gloating prick, is implying that Barack Obama is stupid.
GOP pundits have trotted out the “Obama is stupid” charge regularly since 2008, but it’s always felt like filler—some meaningless lobbyist conjunction added before launching into another bit of pre-fab mendacity. In the last few months, however, it’s seemed more like rescue. As the GOP campaign swarmed to flat taxes, Iran and Israel—like children playing soccer, shambling slackjawed after the ball—the safe rhetoric of “OBAMA DUMB!” has risen to a kind of Hulk-smash ejaculation of thoughtlessness. It’s name-calling of such inane finality that it makes rational debate cease. It obscures unsustainable policy and off-message waffling. Whenever Mitt Romney’s think-tank goblins need to change the narrative from whatever message they can’t agree on, they can switch to the message that Obama’s a stone dummy. That’s what Romney’s really saying whenever he trots out his applause-line chestnut that Obama is a good man who is “in over his head.”
