Whatever Happened to David Gergen?

Not much, apparently -- he still gets on talk shows sounding like he actually knows what's going on. Here he is on Anderson Cooper's 360, telling it like it is (in some weird alternate reality):

I think one of the other aspects of this is very fundamental to who we are as a people. There are a lot of sociologists and historians will tell you we as American people are just different. We're an outliers measured in many ways. Our value system is different. We don't think like Canadians. We don't accept government the way it is. We're not deferential to authority the way Canadians are or in Western Europe.

And so, I think the Clintons misread that some, and I think President Obama has misread that some. When you come and try to sell something big, big government to the American people, they tend to be very, very weary of it. It's been true throughout our history. . . .

I think there's no way that the American people will ever accept single-payer system, a government-run health care system for all. I just don't -- you know, I don't think we're like the British or the Canadians in that sense.

That does not mean you can't have universal coverage. It does mean you can have a very robust system in which poor people have a chance for protection and will have a chance for decent life. It does mean that -- in the American system, we tend to do that more through the private sector than through the public -- than through the public sector.

It's an amazing tour-de-force on Gergen's part -- every scare argument, every disproved exaggeration, rendered in very temperate language as though he actually knows what he's talking about. (Something that I don't ever recall him being guilty of in the past.)

On at least one point there he's demonstrably wrong: Americans are much more deferential to authority than either Canadians or Europeans. I remember a story the novelist Jerzy Kozinski told, of trying to get on a plane in Italy. He donned a suit that looked like a uniform, although it bore no insignia, and went to the airport and very matter-of-factly butted in at the head of the ticket line. The ones who didn't object were the Americans. As I recall -- this was in a TV interview with, I believe, Dick Cavett -- he was amazed and tried the same trick several other times, with the same result.

The American people will accept anything, if you give them some real information and some time to think about it. Look at gay marriage -- not even a concept twenty years ago.

The whole program looks to have been pretty depressing, from an information standpoint.

Read Digby's priceless commentary on this. It's totally High Snark.