Glenn Greenwald: A Country in Shambles, Under GOP Rule

There are few things that make political coverage more unbearable -- and more distorting -- than The David Brooks Syndrome: the extremely patronizing and ill-informed pretense, shared by media and right-wing elites alike, that they can study the Little Common Person like a zoo animal, and then translate and give voice to their simple-minded, good-hearted, salt-of-the-earth perspectives. Rarely has this mentality been so transparent as in the wake of the Biden-Palin debate, as pundits and right-wing polemicists like Brooks, Peggy Noonan and Rich "Starbursts" Lowry rushed forward to proclaim giddily that Regular Americans would love Sarah Palin and this love could even help McCain win, despite -- or, really, because of -- her vapid, content-free telegenic presence.

Actual empirical evidence -- called "polling data" -- has almost uniformly demonstrated how false these condescending pats on the head are, as every single poll conducted thus far (at least that I'm aware of) found that Americans believed that Biden won and is the far more serious candidate for office, and huge numbers continue to have profound doubts about Palin's fitness for office. And the first tracking poll to report a full post-debate day of polling -- the Research 2000 poll for Daily Kos -- finds Obama with a 13-point lead, his largest ever. This joint right-wing/pundit claim that Americans would swoon in the face of Palin's empty chatter, self-conscious folksiness and chronic, seizure-like winking says much more about those making the claim than it does about their Regular People subjects.