Profiles in Ignorance: How America's Politicians Got Dumb and Dumber

by Andy Borowitz

By elevating candidates who can entertain over those who can think, mass media have made the election of dunces more likely.

the credit for the Evil Empire’s demolition must go to Vladimir Lenin himself, for coming up with such a crappy idea for a society to begin with.

Emmet Hughes wrote that Reagan’s win “dramatizes the virtual bankruptcy, politically and intellectually, of a national party.” Such scolding couldn’t have mattered less to Spencer. If he could make Reagan look knowledgeable enough to be elected governor, he would be the go-to Svengali for dumb candidates everywhere. According to Spencer, he wound up managing more than four hundred Republican campaigns.

During one speech, a woman shouted, “Governor Stevenson, you have the vote of all the thinking people.” His response: “That’s not enough, madam. I need a majority.”

You might wonder how creating a crazily expensive new weapons system squared with Reagan’s inaugural pronouncement “Government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem.” Once Reagan got to the White House, he decided government was the solution to a shit ton of problems: big ones, like how to monstrously increase the military arsenal of the United States, and small ones, like how to illegally increase the military arsenal of the Nicaraguan Contras. Despite his reputation as a deficit hawk, he added more to the national debt than all previous presidents combined: it soared from $900 billion to $2.7 trillion on his watch.

The beer quiz has been a staple of stupid campaign coverage ever since, underscoring the condescending assumption that voters want a president who, in the pollsters’ parlance, is just like them. I don’t want a president who’s just like me. I’m pretty sure I’d suck at the job. I want a president to be better than I am: smarter, braver, calmer, and more patient. When a country faces war, economic collapse, or contagion, I’m not sure it’s Miller Time.

Kellyanne Conway, formerly Dan Quayle’s pollster and now counselor to Trump, appeared on NBC’s Meet the Press to defend Spicer’s statement as an example of what she called “alternative facts.” Under Reagan, facts were “stupid things”; under Bush, facts were the silly obsession of “the reality-based community.” Conway was taking the rebranding of facts into a whole new dimension.