RALEIGH — In the famous fable by Aesop, a fox exerts itself in vain attempting to snatch a cluster of grapes. Finally realizing that the grapes were out of his reach, the fox consoled himself by convincing himself they were sour. “Sour grapes” became a way to describe a face-saving attitude for having failed to attain something desperately sought.
In politics, sour grapes manifests itself in denigrating not one’s opponent or the office lost, but through denigrating the opponents’ voters. A favorite tactic is the same one being played out weekly among the fan base of the losing squad — namely, that of “We Lost, But They’re Stupid.” A few examples:
In its issue announcing George Bush’s re-election, the cover of the Daily Mirror of Great Britain asked: “How Can 59,047,087 People Be So Dumb?”
Closer to home, novelist Jane Smiley set the Internet ablaze with her tirade on the online journal Slate. Entitled “The unteachable ignorance of the red states,” her thousand-word screed about Bush voters returned to the words “ignorance” or “ignorant” 12 times.
Shortly after the election, someone at the University of Pennsylvania School of Engineering put out a chart listing the states in descending order according to the average IQ of its citizens, and then listed which candidate the majority of voters in each state chose. The list showed a striking divide between Kerry and Bush states, with the low-IQ states all for Bush. The list was a hoax, however, and to the dupe’s credit, he admitted the hoax and posted data from The Economist showing states ranked in order of math scores or percentage of bachelor’s degree holders, and giving their selection of Bush or Gore (which, of course, showed mixed results).
In the Triangle, writer Godfrey Cheshire the local leftist tabloid The Independent fretted that while our system of government “reflected the Lockean belief that an educated, well-informed adult citizenry would naturally make decisions that combined innate rationality and healthy self-interest,” those assumptions now “look as distant and quaint as Newton’s clockwork universe.”
Sour grapes were sounded on the campus of North Carolina State University, too. English professor Nick Halpern told N.C. State’s Technician Nov. 4, “The Republican students I have talked to are amazingly uninformed. I wish they had learned about the issues before they voted.”
Halpern continued. “An educated nation would have voted for Kerry,” he sniffed.
Prof. Michael Cobb directed his political science class to poll N.C. State students about the election, and their results found students favoring Bush by a margin of 56.8 percent to 41.4 percent for John Kerry. But as Technician reported Nov. 1, “Cobb’s analysis of survey results [was that] republicans [sic] are less knowledgeable about candidates’ positions and tend to have incorrect beliefs in regards to Iraq’s ties to al-Qaeda (none), weapons of mass destructions (none found) and world opinion on the invasion (against it).”
(The Justice Department’s 1988 indictment against Osama bin Laden and Muhammed Atef charged that “al Qaeda reached an understanding with the Government of Iraq that al Qaeda would not work against that government and that on particular projects, specifically including weapons development, al Qaeda would work cooperatively with the Government of Iraq.” The 9/11 Commission found several instances of Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda interacting with Iraq, but they said, with emphasis added, “We have no credible evidence that Iraq and al Qaeda cooperated on attacks against the United States.” Furthermore, mustard gas and sarin nerve agent have been found in Iraq, although no stockpiles have been reported found.)
“The more respondents were misinformed about Iraq, the more likely they supported Bush,” Cobb said, according to Technician.
Unlike Halpern, Cobb at least allowed for countervailing ignorance on the other side. He acknowledged that the results might reflect more than ignorance on one side of the political aisle, but also the content of the questions asked. “Democrats are probably just as misinformed on certain issues,” Cobb told Technician, “but we only asked about the four issues and Iraq,” he said.
Jon Sanders (jsanders@popecenter.org) is a policy analyst for the John W. Pope Center for Higher Education Policy in Raleigh.