Useful Fools

A striking anomaly in the California Recall election was the voting pattern in the San Francisco Bay Area. Also striking is the arrogance of our betters who live there:

Bay Area voters opposed the recall by 63 percent to 37 percent — while Californians as a whole voted to oust Davis 55 percent to 45 percent. Without the nine Bay Area counties, the recall would have passed by 20 percentage points instead of its 10-point margin.

Meanwhile, the region’s voters gave Schwarzenegger 33 percent of the vote as a replacement candidate — while statewide, he garnered 49 percent. Without the Bay Area, Schwarzenegger would have earned 53 percent of the vote

A typical left-wing wise-crack:

As San Francisco political comedian[sic] Will Durst joked: “It’s obvious we’re out of goose step with the rest of the state.”

But here’s the money quote:

And some say intellectualism breeds liberalism.

“It strikes me that the better educated people are, more often than not, they tend to be more liberal, and I think this is a very well-educated area,” said Orville Schell, noted author and dean of the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism.

The intellectual attributes of the region are matched by its physical setting — a place of such beauty and splendor that people come here and never leave.

“When you live in a beautiful place, which the whole Bay Area is, you draw people for whom that is important and the idea of preservation, moderation, of walking a little more softly, is important. And I think that creates a kind of liberal mind-set in an environmental sense and in a larger political sense,” Schell said

Get it? If you aren’t a San Francisco liberal, you are dumber, or less intellectual, or more poorly educated or lacking a good aesthetic sense.

Hmm…. I wonder what that says about those of us who lived in the Bay Area and then left for “fly-over country?” I guess we don’t have the aesthetic sensibilities of those living with overpriced housing, insane government, bums housing challenged individuals in our public spaces, continuous silly liberal rhetoric, high taxes and horrible traffic jams. We can visit there, soak up the benefits, and then leave!

We are the smarter ones.