Not So Dumb About The Politics

One thing I think the Professional Advisers and basically all of the professional Washington class fail to understand is that members of THE LEFT aren't necessarily completely idiotic about politics. One reason I don't want the Democrats to gut Social Security is because I think it would be political suicide to gut Social Security. I don't always think the politics lines up neatly with my political desires. Many even very liberal bloggers and similar suffer from the pundit's fallacy much less than most pundits do. Tom Friedman imagines that the Tom Friedman agenda will garner 256% of the vote, even though the Friedman Agenda is about indistinguishable from the Obama Agenda. I know when my views are relatively popular or not, because I can read polls and tend to give them a bit more weight than "the views of people at my dinner parties" or "my cab drivers" when trying to figure out the art of the possible. To the extent that I'm interested in changing the status quo, I actually have to have a good sense of this stuff.