“I...was impressed with what I didn’t hear. I didn’t hear a word mentioned about the middle class or health care or how people are going to fill up their tanks. I didn’t hear a single word about how you’re going to get a kid through college” (Reuters, 9/4)

Don’t let Republican activists make this election into something that won’t create local opportunity through economic leadership, which, by the way, Democrats have done better, historically. Keep focused on what specifically needs to be done to create opportunity for Americans. Keep attention on what this election is really about.

Republican activists are insulting the intelligence of folks, by way of anti-elitist distractions. Lacking insightful proposals for constructive change, they play on overworked folks’ vague understanding of issues and specific Democratic plans. They create a straw elitist, then oppose the fiction, rather than focusing on what people really need (which Republicans can’t focus on credibly).

Look carefully at Republican appeals to what is called “the conservative base.” It’s tacitly a celebration of illiteracy and parochialism that is dangerous for America’s children in a complexly competitive world. But this ethos of the common sense regime (that keeps so many Americans dissociated from their own citizenship) is comforting to the paternal corporatist, who treats an election as just another aspect of consumer marketing. Consumerism doesn’t have to understand what will really create opportunity for our localities and our children, which is just fine to marketing managers. (But shareholders don’t like recessionary pandering.)

Democracy is only as good as the realism and insightfulness of its people, which includes expectations that national leadership will do what localities cannot do alone, but truly need. That expectation is only realistic if the leadership can do what’s needed—which takes realism, insight, specific proposals, and intelligence. It also requires people to actively be citizens of a democracy rather than consumers of a show.

This disdain for their smarts shows up in the whole way they’ve cast this race now, turning a contest over economic and foreign policy into a culture war of the Real vs. the Elites. It’s a smoke and mirrors game aimed at diverting attention from the fact that the party’s tax policies have helped create an elite that’s more distant from “the people” than ever before.

The scary part is that Republicans have the degree of support that they do, which says something important about who “the people” are: including a large plurality who regard an election like supporting an athletic team. To a large plurality of the public, policies are just beyond them. But if they feel “Go Team” enough to vote (because of “Life” and “God” and guns), then the near-term future of petropolitics is assured.

But the plurality is not the majority. Ultimately, in evolution as in history, intelligence prevails.