How Dumb Do They Think We Are?

This has gotten to be something of a rhetorical question over the last few years, but...

Roger Simon has a piece on the state of the nation called the Last 4th of July. He goes on at some length on the sorry state of things and what might be done to rectify it. The line that jumped out at me was this one:

The road between this Fourth of July and November 6 will be rocky, again in the extreme, perhaps terrifyingly so. In the worst economy since the Great Depression, it’s hard to believe roughly half our fellow citizens still favor the incumbent. But they do. Faced with that level of cognitive dissonance, the struggle ahead will be nothing short of titanic.

Remembering that in 1938, the Really Great Depression had been going on for nearly 10 years with no end in sight. The Treasury Secretary had noted this and remarked that all the administration had to show for their efforts was a huge national debt and observed that based on results, none of them should be re-elected.

Nonetheless, the argument that one shouldn't changes horses in mid-stream held, and everyone got re-elected. Perhaps they were right. 10 years or so later, the depression officially ended.