Sep 23, 2008
Scott Simon interviewed a Republican woman on NPR this morning (September 20, 2008) who sheepishly and apologetically admitted she thought Obama was, well, just plain more intelligent than Sarah Palin.

Intelligence is something you have to apologize for in American politics. It’s something you have to hide. Stevenson (in '52 and '56), McGovern, Carter (in '80), Gore, and Kerry—just to mention losing presidential candidates in our time—were all arguably more intelligent—some way more intelligent—than their opponents. Goldwater, Humphrey, Mondale, and Dukakis probably were as well.

To be intelligent in American politics is to be branded an elitist—and that shows how the New Republican Order has gotten the whammy on our collective common sense. Palin is not an asset to the ticket because she brings intelligence to the team. She is an asset because she is of decidedly average brain power, and therefore identifiable to the masses who have been trained—incredibly—to reject intelligence in a leader.

The top of the ticket is worse. That a man who, in the midst of the worst economic catastrophe in eighty years, has confessed to a weak head for economics; a man who, unquestioningly supportive of the most expensive military debacle in our nation’s history, does not know the difference between a Sunni and a Shia Muslim and thinks Iraq borders Pakistan; a man who doesn’t know Somalia from Sudan or the fact that Czechoslovakia no longer exists; that such a man—additionally well past retirement age, choleric, cancerous, and traumatized—can nevertheless be neck-and-neck with a man whose most outstanding asset is his intelligence demonstrates the extent to which intelligence is a detriment in the American political arena.

Should we be surprised, however, at the tail end of the second administration of a man who cannot put a coherent unscripted sentence together to save his life?

Indeed, Ralph Nader, the candidate who is both most intelligent and most experienced in the race, who has spent his life wrestling in the mud of federal politics and done more to ensure that government live up to its responsibilities than all the other candidates combined, is effectively a non-candidate, ignored by the mainstream media and so feared by the Democratic and Republican contingents that they refuse to debate him.

The Kennedy administration, employing “the best and the brightest,” nevertheless got us into the tangle of Vietnam. Is it any wonder the current crop of less-than-middling intellects have gotten us into far worse pickles, at home and abroad.
tags: Politics