While this looks like a very accurate diagnosis of the problem, it also demonstrates the monumental primitivism of the American mind set. It seems that unlike Europeans, most Americans as essentially incapable of judging a candidate on his or her merits, but instead rely on caricatures and stereotypes from a few primitive morality plays. They do not try to evaluate the candidate's qualifications and abilities, but instead they look how well he resembles the archetypical figure of a "good politician" (avuncular guy next door, who cares about people like me, etc.).
In the eyes of an European observer, this looks ridiculously childish and naïve. To illustrate, I was in Poland several years ago during the election campaign between Walesa, a popular union leader, and Kwasniewski, an ex-communist functionary. Poland has more than a fair share of ignorant smart-alec people, and Walesa tried to capture their sentiments by being a smart-alec populist. He failed miserably because, as I was told time and again, the "proles" wanted not just a guy "like them," but somebody with statesman-like qualities to run the state.
The opposite is true about a big chunk of the US public - they may want the best and most skilled mechanic fixing their car, but they want an average joe-schmoe running the largest polity, economy and military in the world.
This, I believe is the devastating effect of evangelical religion on the American mind. Unlike European religiosity, which focused mainly on theological and philosophical debates among experts that had little significance for the every day life, American religiosity steered away from "elite theology" and instead because the "moral compass" of every day life.
The question "what would Jesus do?" would sound ridiculous in Europe - as even devout religious followers would normally put their religion away why working out everyday life problems, and instead try to solve these problems by schmoozing, dealing and wheeling , pleading, backstabbing and kindred stuff of everyday life interaction. In the US, however, this is a bone fide question asked and answered by seemingly reasonable people.
The effect of this popular "religious compass" was that most every day life situations were viewed not in their own terms and contexts, but through the lenses of religious scripts and morality plays. As a result, real life has been reduced to a signifier of religious scripts. Everything in that life that does not fit the scripts is simply ignored.
This scripted way of thinking is not limited to worshippers of the dead man on a stick, but spilled over to secular and academic life. I was quite puzzled when otherwise educated and open minded people were telling me, time and again, how the life was on the other side of the iron curtain. The fact that they did not set their foot there and I did was immaterial, the script said it should be so and so. Those who did set their foot there, would also follow a script, albeit a different one, e.g. that of an American consumer in a non-consumer society. An earnest CISPES activist who visited the USSR fed me with a story about a missing glass in a soda vending machine and was quite pissed when I asked if that was all that he saw during his visit. The NPR international coverage invariably follows a few predictable scripts, e.g. a folk entrepreneur discovers benefits of capitalism, a woman liberates herself from sexist prejudice through education, etc.
It seems like few people in this country are capable of listening to what others outside their own cultural horizon have to say, and understanding that information in its own contest instead of through the lenses of an American-made morality play. Of course, this tendency is not unique to the US - it can be found in any society - but it seems to be much more widely spread here, thanks, I argue to the poisonous effect of evangelical religion and moralism.
This is also a reason why conservatism does so well, and liberal, progressive left does so poorly in this country. The straitjacket of religious metaphors frames the discourse in terms are inherently favorable to the right wing agenda and reduces complex problems to a set of parable and clichés that every simpleton can easily comprehend. This is the right-wing way of thinking and policy debates used even by seemingly educated people. I remember a debate over privatization in Poland, in which US trained economists of the liberal persuasion tried to convince the public by telling anecdotes and parables from the usual right-wing repertoire. The audience looked in disbelief to this outpouring of bullshit, because they expected a hard-nosed "capitalist" cost-benefit analysis.
The progressives, on the other hand, try to reform a society - and that requires moving away from trite scripts, metaphors and stereotypes. People who are accustomed to fast-food for thought spoon-fed to them via religion and half-assed education, have a hard time thinking outside the box, and they naturally fall back on old metaphors readily supplied by the right. I would venture as far as saying that illiterate, uneducated people are more persuadable to social change because their minds are not as scripted as those of the people who received "little knowledge" through religion or multiple-choice-MacEducation.
Most Americans are not illiterate knuckle-dragging dolts, to be sure. Most of them have little knowledge, most of it in the form of simple cultural and religion-influenced scripts. And as we all know, little knowledge is a very dangerous thing.
Wojtek