Not that smart and not that conservative. Stein gave money and his support to Franken.
I figure Ben Stein for a pre-New Deal Democrat, what they used to call a "lunch-bucket Democrat" of the urban-ethnic but non-Socialist variety.
The old Dems in the 20's were a bunch of Old Jacksonians, tied up in the Grange movement, the Progressive movement, and, if they were in the small towns, the Klan. My grandfather was Irish Catholic and a William Jennings Bryan man, but he was leaned on by small-town Klansmen who were probably just as much Democrats as he was. He voted for FDR just once -- until he figured out what FDR was. He never voted for him again.
The ethnic Democrats took over the Dem Party in 1928 from the rural Jacksonians and the Klan, and four years later the Socialists snookered them all. They didn't recognized FDR's "frontal politics" coalition for what it was (I've never seen his "grand coalition" described as a Soviet-style "frontal politics", which it was), and kept dismissing Stalinists like Harry Hopkins, Harry Dexter White, and Henry Wallace as just exponents of a "variety" of opinion within the "big tent" of Democratic politics. They couldn't have been more wrong, and they have never awakened to reality since.
Today, the lunch-bucket Dems and non-Socialist ethnics are largely asleep in the belly of the Red beast of "progressive" Democratic politics. They don't know they're being digested and that their energies and support are being siphoned off to nourish real evil, and that their own vision of America is being destroyed.
That’s disappointing.