John Yoo, the Berkeley professor who, as a member of the Bush-era Office of Legal Counsel authorized the use of torture, is a lot of things. Among the phrases we might use to describe him is, "not very smart." Here he is engaging in a bit of standard-issue conservative identity politics (via Jonathan Chait):
Voters without a high-school diploma were only 3 percent of the electorate, and they voted Democratic 60 to 36 percent. Presumably, this group benefits the most from the redistribution of income going on under the Obama administration.
Everyone else (high-school grads, some college, college degrees) voted Republican. Democrats lost the middle class and more.
I’ve been trying to figure out what this means (aside from the amazing educational achievements of the electorate -- 97 percent had a high-school degree or more). Does it mean that the over-educated have no more common sense than those with no education? Does it mean that Obama only really appeals to the extremes of the educational distributional curve, because neither end is really responsible for making ends meet and balancing budgets?
There's so much to say about this populism fail, but my first observation is that Yoo seems to be using education as a proxy for income and assuming people without an education automatically make no money. That's pretty elitist! Yoo adds icily, "All those folks out there with M.A.’s and Ph.D.’s know one of their own when they see one." Maybe next Farmer Yoo can sharpen his mattock and show us all how to properly dig a stump; I hear that's essential to the "overeducation" process over at Berkeley Law. Yoo's populism has all the authenticity of Wolf Blitzer doing the dougie, with none of the redemptive self-awareness.
Of course, in 2008, Obama won every single education demographic:
Demographics really are fascinating, and if Yoo were the kind of person who examines evidence rather than working backward from a pre-established conclusion, no matter how noxious, there might have been one in this post. For example, you could take a look at how the above numbers change if you look at education or income levels by race or by gender and make an observation or two about the nature of each party's electoral coalition. If you look at income by race for example, you'd see that John McCain still won whites making under $50,000 a year, the kind of people Yoo means to suggest don't have to make hard financial choices.
Instead you merely have Yoo offering trite conservative narratives about the dumb lazy poor and isolated academic elites. Of course, if we applied the penetrating analysis Yoo offered earlier, you would simply look at these numbers and assume they mean that Republicans don't actually appeal to anyone "responsible for making ends meet and balancing budgets."
Now, this is exactly the kind of banal political analysis you might expect from a trained lawyer who thinks "being a judge" means tailoring your legal rulings to partisan policy preferences. But you should no more look to Yoo for polling analysis than you would if you were trying to figure out the legality of crushing a child's testicles. The American tragedy of course, is that a former president of the United States actually did.
