@maxdancona,
I haven't read through all the comments in this thread yet but I think I've gotten the gist of you argument. I'm pausing here to suggest that your assertion in response to revelette is wrong.
Slogans and 30 second commercials are obviously employed in political campaigns but I don't know how you back-up up your assumption that it is these techniques that decide elections.
Some people neither need nor want long-winded, nuanced policy dissertations, and realize that even if they are provided them by candidates they are very likely to contain statistics that are framed in a way to support one side or the other, logical fallacies and obfuscation galore and plenty of downright lies.
Obamacare didn't require debating policy wonks to be understood by the voters, in fact it was one of Gruber's central points that if the legislation had been explained in a cogent manner which most voters could grasp, it would have received even greater public opposition.
Gruber gleefully admitted that an absence of transparency was a political advantage, but this isn't proof, as he suggested, of the American voter's stupidity, quite the opposite. He, essentially, admitted that if the intent and mechanism of the ACA was explained in a way that anyone might understand, it would have been toast. If you have to lie and confuse to get legislation passed it means that the voters are smart enough to recognize a bad idea when they see it. If they were stupid, the Dems could have told them exactly what they intended and the voters wouldn't have known any better.
For one of the most arrogant SOBs I've ever seen, perhaps the height of Gruber's arrogance is the suggestion that anyone was stupid because they couldn't see past the lies and obfuscation he was engineering. He, and I suspect you, confuse stupidity with other characteristics like trust and frustration. For a number of reasons, that don't include his track record, Obama was able to obtain the trust of a large segment of the population. Of course he has cynically abused that trust, and particularly so with Obamacare, but this doesn't mean the people who invested their trust in him did so because of stupidity (and here I define stupidity as lack of intelligence, not foolishness). And the people that didn't burn down the White House because of their opposition to Obamacare didn't fail to do so because they stupidly believed the BS they were being told.
The voters don't need Lincoln/Douglas style debates that last for hours to determine for whom they should vote. They need honesty, plain language and all the facts and they are not getting them from candidates of either party. So instead they rely one people who they trust and who they think have taken the time they don't have to dig through all the BS for something like the truth: friends, relatives, pundits, radio talk-show hosts, even actors. They also rely on their overall sense of what each party stands for.
I'm sure that there are plenty of voters with low intelligence who vote for one candidate or the other for ridiculous reasons that only a "stupid" person might conceive, (See Gwyneth Paltrow, who is ready to make Obama a dictator because he's so, so handsome) but I'm also sure this is not the profile of the average voter. The "stupid" people who vote, for the most part, go to work every day, raise families, participate in social undertakings and generally manage to keep themselves and their families alive while contributing to society in ways small and large. If given the truth and the facts, deciding on who they think will best run the government is hardly the toughest challenge they have to face.
You seem to think that voters have the ultimate say over how campaigns are run. This might be true if they were provided options every year. If everyone is lying, obfuscating and slinging mud, how do your propose they register their displeasure with the practices? Writing letters to the editors of their local paper?
Obviously as a progressive you are inclined to think that the citizenry is incapable of determining what is best for not only the country, but for themselves; that they need experts like Gruber to make those determinations. Perhaps, like him, you bemoan the need for lies and obfuscation that is created by the stupidity of a populace that has the power of the vote.
In any case, even if it is true that the vast majority of voters are stupid, they do not all share the same stupidity; they are not simply one version of the same stupid lemming rushing over a cliff. They're stupid disagreements may sometime make it difficult to get things that are necessary done, but they also make it even more difficult for us to all rush off that cliff. I much prefer the random stupidity of the people fitfully directing the course of the nation, than any well oiled machine run solely by an elite cadre of grand intellects like Gruber and Obama.
