How Dumb Do They Think We Are?

A friend of mine announced the other day that he didn't much like any of the presidential/vice presidential nominees, but that whoever he voted for, it wasn't going to be Sarah Palin--that having a woman so stupid a heartbeat away from the presidency was more than he could contemplate. Of course, this isn't the first time we've heard this. The problem is, it doesn't square with the facts.

I've spent enough time in business, education and politics to know that, however little we may think of bosses, administrators and leaders, truly stupid people don't get very far in their fields. Truly stupid people get duped, get overwhelmed, get revealed, and then they get fired, early on. This is why the criticism of Sarah Palin, and for that matter Barack Obama, Joe Biden and George W. Bush, is so far off the mark. With careful editing and constant repetition in the media, anyone can be made to look like a fool (Fallacy Alert: Card Stacking). Certain conservative commentators have replayed ad nauseum Obama's claim to have visited 57 states, with just one or two more to go, as well as Joe Biden's invitation to a paraplegic to "Stand up, and let the people have a look at you." Such gaffs, and Palin has made her share, are red meat to the media critics, but they're not a valid standard for judgment.

So what is? Palin's resume provides some excellent examples. As Chair of the Alaska Oil and Gas Conservation Commission, and later as Governor of Alaska, Palin not only successfully negotiated with the world's most expensive lawyers, representing Exxon, BP and Conoco/Phillips, to obtain the most favorable development contracts the state has ever had, but then took them to court to force compliance--and won. You don't get to that point by being stupid. To accept the idea that Sarah Palin is stupid, you must also accept the idea that the oil companies are kind, beneficent, charitable institutions. Does anyone care to defend that proposition?

The truth is, the charge of stupidity is the default liberal argument applied to all Republicans, and it has worked for them for nearly four decades (Propaganda Alert: Name calling). Palin is a stupid, back-woods redneck. McCain is a dull, angry man. George W. Bush is a "village idiot" (the History faculty at Yale and the MBA faculty at Harvard ought to cringe at those charges, since they granted him his degrees). His father was a competent but uninspired bureaucrat, and Ronald Reagan was the original Dumb Republican President. But Reagan's economic policies laid the foundation for the longest, peacetime economic expansion in our nation's history, and his foreign policy pushed the Soviet Union to the brink of collapse. Bush Senior presided over that collapse, and his quiet diplomacy helped prevent the dissolution of that empire into multiple armed conflicts in all but a very few cases. An objective evaluation of George W.'s invasion of Iraq will have to wait for some future historian, but it should be remembered that this "village idiot" outsmarted two Democrat presidential candidates, a Supreme Court Challenge, and the American Congress on tax policy, education, court appointments and a variety of other issues. If these people are stupid, what does that make the ones they defeated?

There are any number of legitimate policy issues on which to base voting decisions in this election. The tired old charge that the candidate must be dumb because she's Republican isn't one of them.